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144144Democracy Now! - Working Classen-USDemocracy Now! - Working Class"We Are Living in the World Occupy Made": New York City Voters Elect Mayor Who Vows to Tax the Richhttp://www.democracynow.org/2013/11/8/we_are_living_in_the_world
tag:democracynow.org,2013-11-08:en/story/dec9c2 JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We begin today with a look at how Tuesday&#8217;s election signaled a sea change in New York City as voters chose a candidate who repeatedly emphasized his progressive vision. The city&#8217;s public advocate, Bill de Blasio, crushed Republican Joe Lhota in the mayoral race to replace billionaire mayor, Mike Bloomberg. De Blasio is set to become the first Democrat to lead New York City in two decades.
During his campaign, De Blasio&#8217;s signature message focused on what he called a &quot;tale of two cities.&quot; Last year, the poorest 20 percent of New York&#8217;s households earned about $9,000, and the richest 5 percent earned an average of nearly $437,000. During his victory speech in Brooklyn, de Blasio vowed to tax the rich to pay for universal pre-kindergarten classes.
MAYRO - ELECT BILL DE BLASIO : The best and the brightest are born in every neighborhood. We all have a shared responsibility and a shared stake in making sure their destiny is defined by how hard they work and how big they dream, and not by their zip code. So, when we call on the wealthiest among us to pay just a little bit more in taxes to fund universal pre-K and after-school programs, we aren&#8217;t threatening anyone&#8217;s success. We are asking those who have done very well to ensure that every child has the same opportunity to do just as well as they have. That&#8217;s how we all rise together.
Public safety is a prerequisite for the thriving neighborhoods that create opportunity in this city, and so is respect for civil liberties. The two are not mutually exclusive. In fact, we must have both. We must work to promote a real partnership between the best police force in the world and the communities they protect from danger, be it local or global. New Yorkers on both sides of the badge understand this. We are all hungry for an approach that acknowledges we are stronger and safer as a city when police and residents work hand in hand.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: From taxing the rich to challenging stop-and-frisk, Mayor-elect de Blasio rose to power with the help of the Working Families Party, an independent political coalition sponsored by labor unions and focused on reducing social and political inequality. Since it launched 15 years ago, the party helped elect progressive candidates throughout the state and worked to increase the minimum wage and raise taxes on the rich. Of 21 new City Council members elected this week, more than half were backed by the Working Families Party.
AMY GOODMAN : The party&#8217;s grassroots organizing efforts are not limited to New York. The group recently won landmark legislation to tackle the student debt crisis in Oregon; fought the corporate education reform agenda in Bridgeport, Connecticut; and won paid sick days in Jersey City, New Jersey. Voters in New Jersey also approved a constitutional amendment to raise the minimum wage by a dollar to $8.25 an hour and add automatic cost-of-living increases each year. They voted this despite the veto of the governor, Chris Christie.
For more, we&#8217;re joined by Danny Cantor, executive director of Working Families Party, former community and union organizer.
Dan Cantor, welcome to Democracy Now! So, in New York, you could vote for, for example, Bill de Blasio either on the Democratic line, or you could vote on the Working Families Party.
DAN CANTOR : That&#8217;s correct. New York has this unusual voting system, legal in a half a dozen states or so, in which a candidate can appear twice on the ballot under two separate lines. It&#8217;s a way for the minor party to add a little oomph to its vote. Vote for de Blasio, we say, or our City Council candidates, but send them a message about taxes or healthcare or housing, whatever the issues are. And then the votes are added together for the final tally. It&#8217;s just a way to put a little extra message into the vote.
But the real work is almost always inside the Democratic Party primary, and that&#8217;s where Working Families has focused its efforts both in New York and in other states trying to get progressives elected. You know, that&#8217;s how you do it. And it&#8217;s hard and messy, but it—when it works, as it did this last week in New York, it&#8217;s a very exciting moment.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Dan, one of the things I raised in my column in the Daily News earlier this week, that this is perhaps the most—not only is it the first Democtratic mayor in 20 years, but it&#8217;s really perhaps the most progressive overall government the City of New York has seen in maybe 50 years. You have to go back to the time of John Lindsay, the liberal Republican, to see a comparable situation, because it&#8217;s not just the mayor, but it&#8217;s the public advocate, Letitia James, that you also supported. It&#8217;s the—all of these members in the City Council—
DAN CANTOR : Right.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —that there is really a potential here for precedent-setting legislation and governance now.
DAN CANTOR : Yeah, well, I mean, that&#8217;s—what are elections about? They&#8217;re about—they&#8217;re supposed to be about the society pausing and saying, &quot;How are we doing?&quot; And, in fact, what de Blasio and his team did, and the councilmembers and Tish James and so on, is they recognized that things were not going so brilliantly for everybody. There had been the Gilded Age of Bloomberg, in which certain things really worked well for certain parts of the society. The real estate crowd really understood they were on a major roll. But de Blasio, to his credit, said, &quot;No, it really is not working well for everyone, and we need to pause and say that.&quot; And what was beautiful about this election is that people heard it, and they responded overwhelmingly.
So now the hard part starts. Getting elected is easy compared to governing. But de Blasio has the wind at his back, and he has a council, a city council, that is not as prominent, obviously, but is really made up of some first-rate people.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But interestingly, you have a Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, who right out of the gate said he is not going to necessarily back de Blasio&#8217;s signature call for—
DAN CANTOR : Yeah.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —raising taxes on the rich to fund pre-K. So what&#8217;s going to be now the—
DAN CANTOR : Well, this is—
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —the tension—
DAN CANTOR : I mean, if I knew, I&#8217;d be in your chair.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —between the mayor now and supposedly a fellow Democrat in Albany?
DAN CANTOR : Yeah. This is going to be the big battle, the big question mark, going forward. Obviously, we favor what de Blasio has been saying about the need both to make these investments in children and other things, and transport and housing, and we also favor obviously progressive taxation. The governor, for whatever reason, has come out against it. We think that&#8217;s not the right place to be. And that&#8217;ll be—you know, we&#8217;ll fight that out in Albany. I like our chances.
AMY GOODMAN : You know, it&#8217;s very interesting the way de Blasio put it. You know, all over the country candidates get defeated when they say, &quot;Tax the rich, tax the rich,&quot; but he made it very specific and inclusive. I mean, when he talked about taxing those who have the greatest wealth to help children in kindergarten.
DAN CANTOR : Yeah, right. He&#8217;s a pro—
AMY GOODMAN : It was hard for even those who will be—who will have their taxes increased to oppose that.
DAN CANTOR : Yeah, and in reality, even rich people know that they&#8217;re not being taxed quite enough if we&#8217;re going to have a society that works for everyone. We&#8217;re probably underdoing it, you know? I know the conventional wisdom is it&#8217;s death for any candidate to ever say they&#8217;re in favor of higher taxes, but it&#8217;s actually not true, particularly when you say the money is going to be used in ways that, you know, provide broad social betterment. That&#8217;s what de Blasio did. That&#8217;s what his allies are talking about. Again, he still has to deliver. He has to combine the need for people to see the government being efficient and effective with the more visionary things he wishes to accomplish.
AMY GOODMAN : He won by 73—
DAN CANTOR : Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : —against Joe Lhota, who was 24 percent. This 73 percent, this is one of the largest margins in the country.
DAN CANTOR : Yeah, I can&#8217;t remember one this large in a long time in a major race. Now, you know, it is New York City, and it&#8217;s got a pretty progressive-minded electorate. And we have a public financing system. And that&#8217;s one of the things that—all the candidates had the same amount of money. And when the candidates have the same amount of money, it means the best ideas have a better chance of being heard.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, to what degree do you think the relative success of the past few years of the Working Families Party can be replicated in other parts of the country? I know you&#8217;ve had some victories in a few states that you may want to talk about a little bit more.
DAN CANTOR : Sure.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But how is the lesson of what you&#8217;ve been doing here possible to extend to other municipalities and other states?
DAN CANTOR : You know, the core idea is that people actually like commonsense progressive ideas. And if you can actually get them heard, over the money din and over the media din, they will respond. That&#8217;s the lesson of the de Blasio and the council victories, is that people actually like what we&#8217;re talking about when we say,wages ought to be higher, people&#8217;s lives ought to be a bit more secure, transportation ought to be a massive investment, so on and so forth. These are not crazy ideas; these are commonsense, quite popular ideas.
So the trick is, can—are we patient enough to build the political organization and power and infrastructure and candidates and training sessions and all the things that over the last decade have produced this change in New York? Turns out we can. In Connecticut, very important elections, not nearly as prominent, in Bridgeport, very poor city in Connecticut, around school privatization, in which parents and working families and teachers sort of rebelled against the, you know, &quot;no child left untested&quot; crowd that really wanted to privatize, and they won. A shocking victory. And it&#8217;s going to have—I think it&#8217;s going to reverberate in at least the school reform wars around the country.
AMY GOODMAN : Oregon?
DAN CANTOR : Oregon wasn&#8217;t an electoral moment; it&#8217;s an off year. But in the legislative session, there have been some great victories there. The most prominent one, which you mentioned, has to do with this notion of debt-free higher education, in which students go to public college tuition-free and then pay back out of their income afterwards 1.5 percent if they went to a two-year college, 3 percent if a four-year college—the idea being it&#8217;s an obligation, but it&#8217;s not a legal debt. It allows young people to get going with their lives instead of being saddled with these enormous debts that currently—
AMY GOODMAN : I wanted to ask you about the effect of Occupy, what it—the changing the conversation, even on the Working Families Party. Yes, New York&#8217;s newly elected mayor, Bill de Blasio, visited Occupy Wall Street in October of 2011. At the time, he was New York City&#8217;s public advocate.
BILL DE BLASIO : Bill de Blasio, New York City public advocate. It&#8217;s my job to make sure the city government of New York is treating people properly. And it&#8217;s all of our jobs to protect the First Amendment and to honor a movement, a meaningful, heartfelt movement that&#8217;s speaking to what people are feeling all over this country.
I say to the mayor: This is not the right way to proceed. We need negotiation. We have seen for weeks—I want to show equal respect to the police department of New York City and to the protesters, who for weeks have worked together, have kept this peaceful, have shown respect to each other and the surrounding community. That&#8217;s how we need to proceed. We need negotiation. And there&#8217;s still time to do it. It&#8217;s up to the mayor and everyone at City Hall now to change course, to sit down with the people from Occupy Wall Street and find a peaceful way forward. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN : That was Bill de Blasio visiting Occupy Wall Street in 2011, also got arrested protesting a hospital closure. Dan Cantor?
DAN CANTOR : Yeah, I think I was next to him when he said that. We are living in the Occupy—in the world Occupy made, for sure. Whether or not they&#8217;re still in Zuccotti Park—they&#8217;re not—we are the beneficiaries of what they did in terms of making this inequality, which is, from our point of view, the core issue of our time—economic inequality, racial inequality, environmental inequality, and so on. So, that&#8217;s a magnificent accomplishment by the young people who did that. And now it&#8217;s our task to sort of bring that into the electoral moment, into governing, and so on, and try to redress some of those things. So I think, yeah, it&#8217;s impossible to overstate what that 99 percent meant in terms of people&#8217;s consciousness.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Dan, I wanted to ask you about the role of the organized labor unions in terms of helping to spawn and nurture Working Families Party. There&#8217;s a handful of unions, like the Communication Workers of America, SEIU , that have sort of been like the pivotal groups who have been help to finance and get Working Families going. How is that relationship in terms of the governance of the Working Families Party?
DAN CANTOR : So, we describe ourselves as a community-labor coalition and, as such, have—we have a rule: You don&#8217;t get to sit at the Working Families table if you don&#8217;t represent someone other than yourself. We think it&#8217;s important that people be—you know, have a base. What are leaders? Leaders are people who have followers. So that&#8217;s community activists. It&#8217;s labor leaders. It&#8217;s green—you know, environmental organizations, issue activists. You know, the unions are integral to our—both our culture and our structure. We—
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But not all the unions, right?
DAN CANTOR : Certainly not all. It&#8217;s a very—it&#8217;s a fraction of them, the more progressive-minded ones. They&#8217;re under attack. I think they realized they needed a political voice, as well. But I wouldn&#8217;t say it&#8217;s a labor party. It&#8217;s a party of labor, but not a labor party; a party of blacks, not a black party; party of greens, not a green party. You can&#8217;t do any of those things in America. It&#8217;s too complicated of a country to just be one constituency. You have to try to build the big tent, but, in our case, imbued with progressive values and ideals.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, we want to thank you very much, Dan Cantor, for joining us. Dan Cantor is former community-union—a community and union organizer, who&#8217;s executive director of the Working Families Party, a third party that began in New York state and has now spread to five other states. This is Democracy Now! We&#8217;ll be back in a moment talking about &quot;Change the Mascot&quot; movement. Stay with us. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We begin today with a look at how Tuesday’s election signaled a sea change in New York City as voters chose a candidate who repeatedly emphasized his progressive vision. The city’s public advocate, Bill de Blasio, crushed Republican Joe Lhota in the mayoral race to replace billionaire mayor, Mike Bloomberg. De Blasio is set to become the first Democrat to lead New York City in two decades.

During his campaign, De Blasio’s signature message focused on what he called a "tale of two cities." Last year, the poorest 20 percent of New York’s households earned about $9,000, and the richest 5 percent earned an average of nearly $437,000. During his victory speech in Brooklyn, de Blasio vowed to tax the rich to pay for universal pre-kindergarten classes.

MAYRO-ELECTBILL DE BLASIO: The best and the brightest are born in every neighborhood. We all have a shared responsibility and a shared stake in making sure their destiny is defined by how hard they work and how big they dream, and not by their zip code. So, when we call on the wealthiest among us to pay just a little bit more in taxes to fund universal pre-K and after-school programs, we aren’t threatening anyone’s success. We are asking those who have done very well to ensure that every child has the same opportunity to do just as well as they have. That’s how we all rise together.

Public safety is a prerequisite for the thriving neighborhoods that create opportunity in this city, and so is respect for civil liberties. The two are not mutually exclusive. In fact, we must have both. We must work to promote a real partnership between the best police force in the world and the communities they protect from danger, be it local or global. New Yorkers on both sides of the badge understand this. We are all hungry for an approach that acknowledges we are stronger and safer as a city when police and residents work hand in hand.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: From taxing the rich to challenging stop-and-frisk, Mayor-elect de Blasio rose to power with the help of the Working Families Party, an independent political coalition sponsored by labor unions and focused on reducing social and political inequality. Since it launched 15 years ago, the party helped elect progressive candidates throughout the state and worked to increase the minimum wage and raise taxes on the rich. Of 21 new City Council members elected this week, more than half were backed by the Working Families Party.

AMYGOODMAN: The party’s grassroots organizing efforts are not limited to New York. The group recently won landmark legislation to tackle the student debt crisis in Oregon; fought the corporate education reform agenda in Bridgeport, Connecticut; and won paid sick days in Jersey City, New Jersey. Voters in New Jersey also approved a constitutional amendment to raise the minimum wage by a dollar to $8.25 an hour and add automatic cost-of-living increases each year. They voted this despite the veto of the governor, Chris Christie.

For more, we’re joined by Danny Cantor, executive director of Working Families Party, former community and union organizer.

Dan Cantor, welcome to Democracy Now! So, in New York, you could vote for, for example, Bill de Blasio either on the Democratic line, or you could vote on the Working Families Party.

DANCANTOR: That’s correct. New York has this unusual voting system, legal in a half a dozen states or so, in which a candidate can appear twice on the ballot under two separate lines. It’s a way for the minor party to add a little oomph to its vote. Vote for de Blasio, we say, or our City Council candidates, but send them a message about taxes or healthcare or housing, whatever the issues are. And then the votes are added together for the final tally. It’s just a way to put a little extra message into the vote.

But the real work is almost always inside the Democratic Party primary, and that’s where Working Families has focused its efforts both in New York and in other states trying to get progressives elected. You know, that’s how you do it. And it’s hard and messy, but it—when it works, as it did this last week in New York, it’s a very exciting moment.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Dan, one of the things I raised in my column in the Daily News earlier this week, that this is perhaps the most—not only is it the first Democtratic mayor in 20 years, but it’s really perhaps the most progressive overall government the City of New York has seen in maybe 50 years. You have to go back to the time of John Lindsay, the liberal Republican, to see a comparable situation, because it’s not just the mayor, but it’s the public advocate, Letitia James, that you also supported. It’s the—all of these members in the City Council—

DANCANTOR: Right.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —that there is really a potential here for precedent-setting legislation and governance now.

DANCANTOR: Yeah, well, I mean, that’s—what are elections about? They’re about—they’re supposed to be about the society pausing and saying, "How are we doing?" And, in fact, what de Blasio and his team did, and the councilmembers and Tish James and so on, is they recognized that things were not going so brilliantly for everybody. There had been the Gilded Age of Bloomberg, in which certain things really worked well for certain parts of the society. The real estate crowd really understood they were on a major roll. But de Blasio, to his credit, said, "No, it really is not working well for everyone, and we need to pause and say that." And what was beautiful about this election is that people heard it, and they responded overwhelmingly.

So now the hard part starts. Getting elected is easy compared to governing. But de Blasio has the wind at his back, and he has a council, a city council, that is not as prominent, obviously, but is really made up of some first-rate people.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But interestingly, you have a Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, who right out of the gate said he is not going to necessarily back de Blasio’s signature call for—

DANCANTOR: Yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —raising taxes on the rich to fund pre-K. So what’s going to be now the—

DANCANTOR: Well, this is—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —the tension—

DANCANTOR: I mean, if I knew, I’d be in your chair.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —between the mayor now and supposedly a fellow Democrat in Albany?

DANCANTOR: Yeah. This is going to be the big battle, the big question mark, going forward. Obviously, we favor what de Blasio has been saying about the need both to make these investments in children and other things, and transport and housing, and we also favor obviously progressive taxation. The governor, for whatever reason, has come out against it. We think that’s not the right place to be. And that’ll be—you know, we’ll fight that out in Albany. I like our chances.

AMYGOODMAN: You know, it’s very interesting the way de Blasio put it. You know, all over the country candidates get defeated when they say, "Tax the rich, tax the rich," but he made it very specific and inclusive. I mean, when he talked about taxing those who have the greatest wealth to help children in kindergarten.

DANCANTOR: Yeah, right. He’s a pro—

AMYGOODMAN: It was hard for even those who will be—who will have their taxes increased to oppose that.

DANCANTOR: Yeah, and in reality, even rich people know that they’re not being taxed quite enough if we’re going to have a society that works for everyone. We’re probably underdoing it, you know? I know the conventional wisdom is it’s death for any candidate to ever say they’re in favor of higher taxes, but it’s actually not true, particularly when you say the money is going to be used in ways that, you know, provide broad social betterment. That’s what de Blasio did. That’s what his allies are talking about. Again, he still has to deliver. He has to combine the need for people to see the government being efficient and effective with the more visionary things he wishes to accomplish.

AMYGOODMAN: He won by 73—

DANCANTOR: Yeah.

AMYGOODMAN: —against Joe Lhota, who was 24 percent. This 73 percent, this is one of the largest margins in the country.

DANCANTOR: Yeah, I can’t remember one this large in a long time in a major race. Now, you know, it is New York City, and it’s got a pretty progressive-minded electorate. And we have a public financing system. And that’s one of the things that—all the candidates had the same amount of money. And when the candidates have the same amount of money, it means the best ideas have a better chance of being heard.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, to what degree do you think the relative success of the past few years of the Working Families Party can be replicated in other parts of the country? I know you’ve had some victories in a few states that you may want to talk about a little bit more.

DANCANTOR: Sure.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But how is the lesson of what you’ve been doing here possible to extend to other municipalities and other states?

DANCANTOR: You know, the core idea is that people actually like commonsense progressive ideas. And if you can actually get them heard, over the money din and over the media din, they will respond. That’s the lesson of the de Blasio and the council victories, is that people actually like what we’re talking about when we say,wages ought to be higher, people’s lives ought to be a bit more secure, transportation ought to be a massive investment, so on and so forth. These are not crazy ideas; these are commonsense, quite popular ideas.

So the trick is, can—are we patient enough to build the political organization and power and infrastructure and candidates and training sessions and all the things that over the last decade have produced this change in New York? Turns out we can. In Connecticut, very important elections, not nearly as prominent, in Bridgeport, very poor city in Connecticut, around school privatization, in which parents and working families and teachers sort of rebelled against the, you know, "no child left untested" crowd that really wanted to privatize, and they won. A shocking victory. And it’s going to have—I think it’s going to reverberate in at least the school reform wars around the country.

AMYGOODMAN: Oregon?

DANCANTOR: Oregon wasn’t an electoral moment; it’s an off year. But in the legislative session, there have been some great victories there. The most prominent one, which you mentioned, has to do with this notion of debt-free higher education, in which students go to public college tuition-free and then pay back out of their income afterwards 1.5 percent if they went to a two-year college, 3 percent if a four-year college—the idea being it’s an obligation, but it’s not a legal debt. It allows young people to get going with their lives instead of being saddled with these enormous debts that currently—

AMYGOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about the effect of Occupy, what it—the changing the conversation, even on the Working Families Party. Yes, New York’s newly elected mayor, Bill de Blasio, visited Occupy Wall Street in October of 2011. At the time, he was New York City’s public advocate.

BILL DE BLASIO: Bill de Blasio, New York City public advocate. It’s my job to make sure the city government of New York is treating people properly. And it’s all of our jobs to protect the First Amendment and to honor a movement, a meaningful, heartfelt movement that’s speaking to what people are feeling all over this country.

I say to the mayor: This is not the right way to proceed. We need negotiation. We have seen for weeks—I want to show equal respect to the police department of New York City and to the protesters, who for weeks have worked together, have kept this peaceful, have shown respect to each other and the surrounding community. That’s how we need to proceed. We need negotiation. And there’s still time to do it. It’s up to the mayor and everyone at City Hall now to change course, to sit down with the people from Occupy Wall Street and find a peaceful way forward. Thank you.

DANCANTOR: Yeah, I think I was next to him when he said that. We are living in the Occupy—in the world Occupy made, for sure. Whether or not they’re still in Zuccotti Park—they’re not—we are the beneficiaries of what they did in terms of making this inequality, which is, from our point of view, the core issue of our time—economic inequality, racial inequality, environmental inequality, and so on. So, that’s a magnificent accomplishment by the young people who did that. And now it’s our task to sort of bring that into the electoral moment, into governing, and so on, and try to redress some of those things. So I think, yeah, it’s impossible to overstate what that 99 percent meant in terms of people’s consciousness.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Dan, I wanted to ask you about the role of the organized labor unions in terms of helping to spawn and nurture Working Families Party. There’s a handful of unions, like the Communication Workers of America, SEIU, that have sort of been like the pivotal groups who have been help to finance and get Working Families going. How is that relationship in terms of the governance of the Working Families Party?

DANCANTOR: So, we describe ourselves as a community-labor coalition and, as such, have—we have a rule: You don’t get to sit at the Working Families table if you don’t represent someone other than yourself. We think it’s important that people be—you know, have a base. What are leaders? Leaders are people who have followers. So that’s community activists. It’s labor leaders. It’s green—you know, environmental organizations, issue activists. You know, the unions are integral to our—both our culture and our structure. We—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But not all the unions, right?

DANCANTOR: Certainly not all. It’s a very—it’s a fraction of them, the more progressive-minded ones. They’re under attack. I think they realized they needed a political voice, as well. But I wouldn’t say it’s a labor party. It’s a party of labor, but not a labor party; a party of blacks, not a black party; party of greens, not a green party. You can’t do any of those things in America. It’s too complicated of a country to just be one constituency. You have to try to build the big tent, but, in our case, imbued with progressive values and ideals.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you very much, Dan Cantor, for joining us. Dan Cantor is former community-union—a community and union organizer, who’s executive director of the Working Families Party, a third party that began in New York state and has now spread to five other states. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a moment talking about "Change the Mascot" movement. Stay with us.

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Fri, 08 Nov 2013 00:00:00 -0500VIDEO: Understanding the Mondragon Worker Cooperative Corporation in Spain's Basque Countryhttp://www.democracynow.org/blog/2013/3/25/video_understanding_the_mondragon_worker_cooperative_corporation_in_spains_basque_country
tag:democracynow.org,2013-03-25:blog/8a0bbd Watch a 2012 interview Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman did with Mikel Lezamiz, director of Cooperative Dissemination at the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in Spain&#8217;s Basque Country. He described how the project relies on a participatory model in which the workers are the cooperative&#8217;s members.
AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I&#8217;m Amy Goodman. We&#8217;re in the Basque region of Spain, not far from one of the largest worker cooperatives in the world. It&#8217;s called Mondragon. And we&#8217;re joined right now by Mikel Lezamiz. He is director of Mondragon Cooperative Dissemination. We are sitting in his backyard in Busturia, Spain.
Welcome to Democracy Now! It&#8217;s great to have you with us. Explain what Mondragon is, how it got started.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Mondragon started in 1956, creating the first industrial cooperative. But before that, Father Arizmendiarrieta, the leader, the priest, who started with all the projects, started in 1943 creating the school, the technical school. And after that, the students of this school, he pushed to five people to create the first cooperative in 1956—the name at that time, Ulgor; today, Fagor.
AMY GOODMAN : And why did this priest want to start a cooperative? Talk about the political times here in Spain.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK. In that time, it was hard times after the civil war that finished in 1939. And Father Arizmendiarrieta went to Mondragon in order to be a priest, but he started with a school. And he wanted to—first of all, before to create the cooperative, he went to the biggest company in Mondragon to—with the directors, telling to give the possibility to all the workers to be part in management, in profits and being ownership. That was 1955. They didn&#8217;t assent him, and for that reason he pushed to some workers to set up their own cooperatives where everybody can participate in management, in profits and being ownership.
AMY GOODMAN : And these were graduates of the school that he had set up, the technical college.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : That&#8217;s true. They were engineers in that times, and they were working in that big company. But in the company, they didn&#8217;t assent, and for that reason he pushed to these five people to create their own projects. The idea was—and it is—that the workers, everybody, has to be the director or has to be the entrepreneur or has to be the person who makes the decision and not to work for anyone. So we have to part—we have to have parts in management, in profit and being ownership. That is the most essential idea. Before, there were a lot of ideas of the Catholic Church innovate to humanize the factories, to humanize the industrialization at that times. But Father Arizmendiarrieta was—went more than only humanizing. So he wanted to give the power to decide the future each one, not depending from another manager or another capitalist.
AMY GOODMAN : So these were very difficult years. Franco was in power. People felt marginalized. They didn&#8217;t have jobs. So this priest comes into this town, sets up a college, and then tries to set up this cooperative. But didn&#8217;t he need a bank to support it?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Yes. After three years—that was in 1959—so, they started the first cooperatives in 1956, and after, they create another three cooperatives. And Father Arizmendiarrieta had the idea that we have to set up the cooperative bank in order to create new cooperatives and to support the cooperatives with financial support. But not only with the financial, most very clever, creating the entrepreneurial division inside that cooperative bank in order to research the market and to decide, OK, which kind of jobs we can create, which kind of product we can produce. And after that, from this entrepreneurial division, we help—or, they help to create new cooperatives. And after the bank, the entrepreneurial—no, the bank division support financially, but it was a very good idea to create the bank with this entrepreneurial division to create new cooperatives.
AMY GOODMAN : Now explain, in these first years, what were the Mondragon cooperatives? What were they making? What were the products they were coming out with?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Yes, in Fagor, domestic appliances, they produced domestic appliances. But the first one was a cook. And—
AMY GOODMAN : A stove?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : A stove, a stove. And after that, they start producing the refrigerator, the washing machine and water central heatings. And now is the—
AMY GOODMAN : So why would people buy Mondragon products?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Because good quality and good price and good service. I think that all over the world and everybody buy because good quality and price and service. Sometimes you can buy because philosophy, but no, but if you have a bad quality or it&#8217;s more expensive, you don&#8217;t want to buy. So, for that reason, we always—we are trained to produce always with quality, train to give the best price, you know, to permit to everybody to buy this kind of good for their house. And after that, we have to give the good service.
AMY GOODMAN : Now, people probably, if they&#8217;ve heard of co-ops, have heard of food co-ops, where a community gathers together, and they provide a couple of hours a week to make a cooperative work, and that&#8217;s a lot of human effort. But Mondragon is also highly technological. You are making products. Can you talk about how you came to be on the cutting edge of technology? It wasn&#8217;t just people working in a good-natured way, in a cooperative way together.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Yes. In fact, we have at this moment 14 research and development centers, in order to help to the different sectors that we are producing different goods or our products. Innovation was a very important value for us, and today it is. And today maybe it&#8217;s more than before also, in order to be profitable and [inaudible]. But always we have this idea that, OK, education is very important for people, and as [inaudible] for enterprise and for the community. But after the education, innovation is very important. Social responsibility is another value. And cooperation and solidarity with the community is very, very important. But innovation, it&#8217;s a very important feature inside Mondragon. And from the first ideas, Father Arizmendiarrieta had this idea to create the research center in order to help and to be independent from the American or German or Japanese technology. So we have to be—we don&#8217;t have to depend from different technologies. And, first of all, maybe they start buying the goods or buying the rights to produce, but at this moment, for example, we have at this moment 716 patents, worldwide patents, that give us the possibility to be independent from another high-technology companies or cities or countries. So, innovation is very important.
AMY GOODMAN : I was just speaking to lehendakari , the president of the Basque region, Patxi López, talking about Mondragon and its importance, one of the largest businesses in the Basque region. Can you talk, Mikel, about the Basque quality, if you will, of the Mondragon cooperative? I mean, why it grew out of the Basque region, for people outside of not only the Basque region, but Spain?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK, well, first of all, I have to tell you that I believe and we believe that everybody can create cooperatives, and it&#8217;s possible to create cooperatives, because, as you know, cooperatives idea, it didn&#8217;t start in Mondragon. Cooperatives started in the U.K., and before to the Basque Country, they were in France, in the States and wherever. But after that, what about the cooperative culture, what about the Basque culture connected with the cooperatives? And, OK, yes, we have in fact the internal, the political democracy. In the last 10 centuries also, it was here. They were more or less [inaudible] democracy, because in each town and in each provinces, we choose. But 10 centuries ago, we choose the—or they choose the boss or the—
AMY GOODMAN : The leader of the town.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : The leaders, OK. But also, today, we think that one of the very important features of the Basque region is the solidarity, in order to—in order to help each other. But this is not a paradise. The Basque Country is not a paradise. And Mondragon cooperatives is not a paradise. And we are not angels. And so, sometimes when we have to tighten the belt, people start having problems and speak, and we are very critical also about all the problems that we have. And so, I think that cooperatives is possible all over the world. Basque people are better than the others? No. We are normal people.
AMY GOODMAN : No, in fact, it didn&#8217;t rise out of a paradise; just the opposite. You&#8217;re talking about Spain during Franco&#8217;s years, and perhaps the most repressed area in Spain was the Basque region for Franco.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Yes, that&#8217;s true.
AMY GOODMAN : The bombing of Guernica, for example—
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Yes, that&#8217;s true.
AMY GOODMAN : —in 1937, 75 years ago.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : And this kind of problems maybe gave us the possibility to work together and to be more in solidarity, more solidarity. And that will be one of the features that permit us to create this kind of a cooperative project maybe.
AMY GOODMAN : Mikel, can you talk about the response of small businesses in the area, because Mondragon is big now? It&#8217;s not just the alternative; it is the power here in Basque region in Spain. How many people work now for Mondragon cooperatives?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Yes, in Mondragon cooperative groups, we have 83,000—83,000 workers, full time. And after, we have another 15,000 or 20,000 working part time, mostly in the supermarket. So, we are close to 100,000 workers altogether, full time and part time. And we have 120 cooperatives. So, cooperatives are not very big. But working together and with the close inter-cooperation that we have, we are now the best, the best now, the biggest, the biggest company in the Basque Country. And speaking about jobs and employment, we are the fourth biggest in Spain and among the seven biggest in sales.
AMY GOODMAN : And the largest cooperative in the world.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK, well, there are—well, but, for example, in U.K., they design a cooperative that the name is the Co-operative Group, that is a supermarket. And after that, they have some bank services and a funeral services. And they are, for example, 110,000 workers. In that case, it&#8217;s a consumer cooperative, so the consumers or the clients are their members. In our case is that we are the workers, and we are the members.
AMY GOODMAN : How do small businesses in Spain compete with Mondragon, now one of the largest businesses in Spain?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK, for us, the first market is not Spain. It&#8217;s Europe. So we are competing with—because we are selling at this moment 70 percent of our products all over the world. We are exporting to 150 different countries. And, for us, yes, the first foreign market is Europe. And also, Spain is important for us—yeah, that&#8217;s true. But I think that the other companies feel or think that, OK, we are working well, because we are working all together, because the most important feature or characteristic of Mondragon is that these 120 cooperatives, that are big and small cooperatives, are working together, and we set up one group, one corporation, but we pass people from one to the other cooperatives. We pass also money from one to the other cooperative. We pass cash, liquidity, from one to the other cooperatives, and also innovation. And that is very important in order to overcome the economic crisis. So in this moment, a lot of small companies also are thinking or think that Mondragon is going well because we can compete all over the world, because the internal amount of the exportation is very high and because we are overcoming much better than the others, in general, the crisis.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, that&#8217;s very interesting, the financial crisis and how it&#8217;s affected you. And I think this would be very interesting for people to hear in the United States. You have large banks in the United States that are only getting larger and only more profitable for the top managers, but are foreclosing on people&#8217;s houses at a very high rate, etc. How did Mondragon respond to the financial crisis, how you fared during these times?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Yes, we believe that, first of all, yesterday we were 430 directors of Mondragon together in a congress that we set up every year, speaking of the future, about the challenge that we have for the next years. And we believe, there also, we were—we clever said that, OK, we are going to overcome the economic crisis because this inter-cooperation, the relation between cooperatives, because if one cooperative have some problems—
AMY GOODMAN : Give us an example of a cooperative, what it makes, and another cooperative, what it makes. And—
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : For example, at this moment, we have 250 people relocated in another cooperative. They don&#8217;t have no jobs in their own cooperatives.
AMY GOODMAN : What was that cooperative doing? What was it making?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : No, different kind of cooperatives. For example, in the domestic appliances sector, from Fagor, that they are now suffering a big problem because the lack of construction in Spain, and in Europe also, because the economic crisis. And Fagor domestic appliances, they are selling for new apartments and also to repair, that does one. But in this case, Fagor is suffering this economic crisis, and some of these workers are working in another cooperative.
AMY GOODMAN : And what is that cooperative?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : For example, machine tools sectors, car components cooperatives. Yeah, in different cooperatives. And so, that is a very important idea. First of all, we are passing money, cash, liquidity, from one to the other cooperatives, because, as you know, the lack of liquidity from the banks, it&#8217;s very high. And some of our competitors are suffering. And some of them, they are going down and closing because this lack of liquidity. Now, we don&#8217;t have this kind of problem, because it&#8217;s very common to pass money from one to the other cooperatives, to pass liquidity, cash, from one to the other cooperatives, in order to overcome the economic crisis.
AMY GOODMAN : So here you are in Spain really actually thriving, certainly getting by, as Bankia, the largest bank conglomerate, has—is going under, involved in perhaps the biggest banking fraud in Spain&#8217;s history.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : And in fact, for example our cooperative bank, Caja Laboral, that is the second-biggest in the Basque Country, and in the north of Spain, from Madrid to the north of Spain, it&#8217;s the—among the second-, the third-biggest bank, is going very well. In fact, all the data that we have are, in general, much better than the banks on the—most of the banks. And it&#8217;s because, in this case, we—in the Basque Country, there is not so big a problem with the construction, because the problem of the real estate and the construction was more in the east part and the south part of Spain. Here, we are not—we don&#8217;t have this kind of problems connected also with the banks. And also, it&#8217;s because the bank also is more connected with industry. And as you know, the Basque Country is more industrial than the construction or than the others. It&#8217;s the most influence or the most important industrial area of Spain, the Basque Country.
AMY GOODMAN : Mikel, can you explain how the management structure works? What does it mean to say worker-owners?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK. Yes, we set up the most important things, therefore, in the cooperatives is the general assembly, the general assembly formed by all the workers that are the members of this cooperative. For example, going to Fagor domestic appliances, they are at this moment 2,500 workers, producing washing machine, dishwashers, the refrigerator, and then so on—2,500. And they set up at least once a year the general assembly in order to make the most important decision and decide the strategy, the annual report, and to approve the annual report, and then so on. And in this case, it&#8217;s the general assembly who makes the decision. But after that, we choose the governing council—the board of directors, you say—the governing council, that in the case of Fagor, they have 12 people—president, vice president, secretary and another nine. In the small cooperatives, there are maybe only three or maybe five, seven, nine; or being big, 12 people. And this governing council set up at least once a month in order to make the decision every month. And they choose the general manager, the CEO , in order to execute and to manage the company, and in this case, to propose the important decision. But it&#8217;s the governing council that makes the decision. It&#8217;s not the general manager. And after that, the general manager has the finance director, the people director, production director, marketing director, as they need.
AMY GOODMAN : And how do you share the profits?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK, from the gross profit in each cooperative, they have to put some money in the cooperative—in the corporate, Mondragon corporate corporation. So, for example, all the cooperatives has to put 10 percent of their gross profits in Mondragon investment fund. This investment fund is to create new cooperatives or to help the cooperatives to set up new business or for the internationalization. If one company needs to buy a factory in the States, or they want to create a new factory in the States, the cooperatives is going to put 60 percent of the investment, and 40 percent is put from this Mondragon investment fund. They have to put another 2 percent in Mondragon education, to help mostly to the university, Mondragon University, and another 2 percent in Mondragon solidarity fund. This is—this fund is in case of losses of each cooperative, solidarity fund. But after that, they have to pay their taxes. And after paying taxes, they have their net profits.
How we share the net profits: 10 percent should go, because by law it&#8217;s compulsory to do so, 10 percent goes to the fund of education and for the society. This is to help the children or the NGOs or support for the society. Each cooperative, they say how they are going to share this 10 percent. And after that, we send another 45 percent to the fund or reserve of cooperatives. This is to invest in the cooperatives to work every one all the year. And the other 45 percent are returns, returns to workers. But in this case, we don&#8217;t get these returns—these dividends, as you say; we say &quot;returns&quot;—because these returns is to work. And we don&#8217;t get these dividends in cash. We capitalize. So, everyone—we have the initial capital, and after that, all this capital, all these returns that we share between us, and I&#8217;ll get this money when I retire. But in the meantime, my company is using this capital, this investment, and that is another way of overcoming the economic crisis. One of the most important features of Mondragon is that 90 percent of the profits, we reinvest, because only 10 percent goes to the society directly, and the other 45 goes to the cooperatives to invest in new product and new machines and then so on, and the other 45 is my money, but that is inside the cooperatives, and the cooperatives invest. So, 90 percent of the profits, we reinvest in order to create employment.
AMY GOODMAN : Did you have to decide about job cuts or pay cuts during the crisis?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : We never fire any member of Mondragon—we never—in these 56 years, because we pass, and before of going unemployed, we pass from one to the other cooperatives. At this moment, only 250 are relocated. But before, I can remember that in 1991, &#8217;92, &#8217;93, that were a very high crisis, in that moment we had more than 2,000 people relocated in the other cooperatives in order to overcome the economic crisis. And after that, in 1994, we started growing, and now we are more than before.
AMY GOODMAN : Mikel, Mondragon has an actual MBA program for cooperatives?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : We have, yes. And I have already made it, the MBA , master&#8217;s business administration.
AMY GOODMAN : Where?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : In Mondragon University. In Otalora, in my case, I made it in Otalora. Otalora, it&#8217;s our management and cooperative training center that belongs to MCC , but the teachers are connected with the university, and the title is given by the university. But after that, there are another MBA in different universities also here—in Bilbao, for example—and in the public universities. And it&#8217;s possible to do the MBA in management, cooperative management.
AMY GOODMAN : Your wife teaches in Mondragon. She teaches kids. Does she teach a Mondragon philosophy of cooperatives? Do the kids learn about what it means to live in a cooperative way in school?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK, we don&#8217;t have any subjects specific with—that the name is &quot;cooperative education,&quot; no. Only in the university, in the last year of the engineering school, but only in the engineering school, we have this subject that is cooperative education. But in the other [inaudible] schools, in the other faculties and also in the primary school and secondary school, we don&#8217;t have any subject that the name is &quot;cooperative education.&quot; But we try to teach them and to educate them in cooperative values, cooperative values that are transpersonal values, not only the knowledge, but also we try to, for example, working together and giving them more and more autonomy, or giving them more and more participation possibility, because, for example, in the university, the students are members of the university. Not only the workers or not only the teachers and the staff are members; also the students—the students are the members, and after that, the companies, cooperatives. But also, conventional companies, they are not allowed, but all of them, they can be part of the university. And in this case, students are participating in the cooperatives. And after that, all the works they have to do, they work in groups. And so, the cooperative values, we try to implement, to integrate in each students working every day.
AMY GOODMAN : How do you deal with having to manufacture products outside of the cooperative? You have factories in other countries. Where are they?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Yes, we have at this moment 77 factories overseas, all over the world. But mostly—most of them are in France and in Europe. But we have also in the States, in Brazil, Mexico, China, India. But—
AMY GOODMAN : Where in the United States?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : We&#8217;re in Arkansas, for example.
AMY GOODMAN : Arkansas.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Little Rock, yes. And—but these companies, these factories, are not cooperatives yet. So, most of them, most of the workers that are abroad, are not members; they are employees. We have a plan, and we started before, two years before the economic crisis. We started with the pilot projects—one of these in Poland, another one in Mexico, and another one in Brazil—speaking with the trade unions, speaking with the workers, white-collar worker, blue-collar workers, and also with the administration, in order to give them the possibility to participate in property, so being ownership, in management and in results. But because the economic crisis, because this is a process, it&#8217;s a long process, and that it takes at least five years, and after two years, in 2008, start the economic crisis, and overseas, we have stopped. We have already started becoming cooperatives in Spain, in the Basque Country and in Spain, but not yet in the other parts of the world.
AMY GOODMAN : And where do you unions fit in? I mean, when you started during Franco&#8217;s time, unions were forbidden, and maybe Mondragon cooperative was an answer to that. But now, working with unions in this country and around the world?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK, well, we have—also here, we have good relation with the trade union. As you know, here in a cooperative, trade union don&#8217;t work, because it&#8217;s the general assembly of all the workers who makes the decision, the most important decision. And, for example, how much we are going to increase the salary or how much we are going to decrease the salary, it&#8217;s the general assembly who makes this kind of decision. But overseas, we speak with the trade union, because we have to—we have to be together and to work together in order to give them the possibility to understand what does it mean to work for cooperatives. And in this case, trade unions are important, and—but the most important, in order to convince all the trade union, all the workers, is a very important value that the name is transparency. Transparency is very important here, but also overseas and in a conventional factory. If we are transparent, giving to all the workers and to the trade union the possibility to know everything about the company, and making every month meetings to explain how is going the company and what is the strategy and what is the—how we see the future and then so on, that is the best way to integrate and to motivate everybody and also to understand from the union, trade union.
AMY GOODMAN : Mondragon International, one of the world&#8217;s largest worker cooperatives, starting to work with the United Steelworkers a few years ago, you announced an agreement with Mondragon to develop unionized worker cooperatives in the manufacturing sector in the U.S. How has that gone?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK, well, we have an agreement with them in order to work together or to help them to build or to create cooperatives or to become some worker-owned companies and cooperatives. We are working. We have a very good relation. Maybe it&#8217;s not easy to make steps quickly, because this kind of process, I told you before that it takes at least five years, because we have to change the culture, and it&#8217;s not easy to convince everybody. But we think that that is going well, slowly. But we think that it will be profitable for them, for us and for the world.
AMY GOODMAN : The United States, in the corporate media, capitalism is equated with democracy, so you question capitalism, you&#8217;re questioning democracy. Yet you provide an alternative to capitalism, the Mondragon cooperatives, where people live very well, and they—and no one has lost their jobs, you say. Explain how it works. Is this an alternative?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : We—always we say that we prefer to work in our own way. We don&#8217;t want to create conflicts between us and with the others and with the capitalists and then so on. We think that in this century, in this 21st century, that everybody has a lot of knowledge. Every worker, and so, at this moment, in most of the countries, that the workers are not illiterate. So, and they have a lot of information and a lot of training. Today, the management model, also the management system, should be more participative, more democratical, because everybody wants to—everybody knows a lot, and everybody can participate, and it will be much better for them. And in this case, we think that—we don&#8217;t say that it&#8217;s another way or—no, we say that this is good for everybody. If everybody can make their own decision, it&#8217;s much better for them and for the society, because, after that, the aims is not to resolve my own problems. We have to resolve—or we have to develop the society, because our mission is to create wealth within the society. Our mission is not to earn money. Our mission is to create wealth within the society.
How? Through entrepreneurial development and job creation. That is our aim. And in this case, we think that democracy is much better for everyone, if participation possibilities is much better for everybody. And trying to be in solidarity—and being in solidarity, we can develop the community. And for that reason, we think, OK, this is maybe another way, or not, but this is—we think that it&#8217;s a very human way, a better human way than another one. And we think that it&#8217;s possible to compete with everyone, being a cooperative and being ownership. And we think that in the future, in this 21st century, all the things, all the ways, all the affairs, also the business, should came to this idea of giving the participation possibility to everyone, and not to only one people or 10 people making the decision, and the others has to continue, has to work behind this decision.
AMY GOODMAN : The 99 percent?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Ninety—yeah, or more. Why not? Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : The wage differential between the highest paid in Mondragon and the lowest-paid workers, Mikel?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : In most of the cooperatives, the biggest differences between the top and the low is one to 4.5 times, 4.5 times. But the biggest, the CEO of Mondragon, is earning six times the minimum minimum salary.
AMY GOODMAN : Mikel Lezamiz, thank you so much for joining us.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK.
AMY GOODMAN : Mikel Lezamiz is the director of Mondragon Cooperative Dissemination. We&#8217;re speaking here in Busturia, Spain, in the Basque region, not far from Mondragon, where he works and lives. More than 100,000 people work in the Mondragon cooperatives. This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report .
Watch a 2012 interview Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman did with Mikel Lezamiz, director of Cooperative Dissemination at the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in Spain’s Basque Country. He described how the project relies on a participatory model in which the workers are the cooperative’s members.

AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re in the Basque region of Spain, not far from one of the largest worker cooperatives in the world. It’s called Mondragon. And we’re joined right now by Mikel Lezamiz. He is director of Mondragon Cooperative Dissemination. We are sitting in his backyard in Busturia, Spain.

Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. Explain what Mondragon is, how it got started.

MIKELLEZAMIZ: Mondragon started in 1956, creating the first industrial cooperative. But before that, Father Arizmendiarrieta, the leader, the priest, who started with all the projects, started in 1943 creating the school, the technical school. And after that, the students of this school, he pushed to five people to create the first cooperative in 1956—the name at that time, Ulgor; today, Fagor.

AMYGOODMAN: And why did this priest want to start a cooperative? Talk about the political times here in Spain.

MIKELLEZAMIZ: OK. In that time, it was hard times after the civil war that finished in 1939. And Father Arizmendiarrieta went to Mondragon in order to be a priest, but he started with a school. And he wanted to—first of all, before to create the cooperative, he went to the biggest company in Mondragon to—with the directors, telling to give the possibility to all the workers to be part in management, in profits and being ownership. That was 1955. They didn’t assent him, and for that reason he pushed to some workers to set up their own cooperatives where everybody can participate in management, in profits and being ownership.

AMYGOODMAN: And these were graduates of the school that he had set up, the technical college.

MIKELLEZAMIZ: That’s true. They were engineers in that times, and they were working in that big company. But in the company, they didn’t assent, and for that reason he pushed to these five people to create their own projects. The idea was—and it is—that the workers, everybody, has to be the director or has to be the entrepreneur or has to be the person who makes the decision and not to work for anyone. So we have to part—we have to have parts in management, in profit and being ownership. That is the most essential idea. Before, there were a lot of ideas of the Catholic Church innovate to humanize the factories, to humanize the industrialization at that times. But Father Arizmendiarrieta was—went more than only humanizing. So he wanted to give the power to decide the future each one, not depending from another manager or another capitalist.

AMYGOODMAN: So these were very difficult years. Franco was in power. People felt marginalized. They didn’t have jobs. So this priest comes into this town, sets up a college, and then tries to set up this cooperative. But didn’t he need a bank to support it?

MIKELLEZAMIZ: Yes. After three years—that was in 1959—so, they started the first cooperatives in 1956, and after, they create another three cooperatives. And Father Arizmendiarrieta had the idea that we have to set up the cooperative bank in order to create new cooperatives and to support the cooperatives with financial support. But not only with the financial, most very clever, creating the entrepreneurial division inside that cooperative bank in order to research the market and to decide, OK, which kind of jobs we can create, which kind of product we can produce. And after that, from this entrepreneurial division, we help—or, they help to create new cooperatives. And after the bank, the entrepreneurial—no, the bank division support financially, but it was a very good idea to create the bank with this entrepreneurial division to create new cooperatives.

AMYGOODMAN: Now explain, in these first years, what were the Mondragon cooperatives? What were they making? What were the products they were coming out with?

MIKELLEZAMIZ: Yes, in Fagor, domestic appliances, they produced domestic appliances. But the first one was a cook. And—

AMYGOODMAN: A stove?

MIKELLEZAMIZ: A stove, a stove. And after that, they start producing the refrigerator, the washing machine and water central heatings. And now is the—

AMYGOODMAN: So why would people buy Mondragon products?

MIKELLEZAMIZ: Because good quality and good price and good service. I think that all over the world and everybody buy because good quality and price and service. Sometimes you can buy because philosophy, but no, but if you have a bad quality or it’s more expensive, you don’t want to buy. So, for that reason, we always—we are trained to produce always with quality, train to give the best price, you know, to permit to everybody to buy this kind of good for their house. And after that, we have to give the good service.

AMYGOODMAN: Now, people probably, if they’ve heard of co-ops, have heard of food co-ops, where a community gathers together, and they provide a couple of hours a week to make a cooperative work, and that’s a lot of human effort. But Mondragon is also highly technological. You are making products. Can you talk about how you came to be on the cutting edge of technology? It wasn’t just people working in a good-natured way, in a cooperative way together.

MIKELLEZAMIZ: Yes. In fact, we have at this moment 14 research and development centers, in order to help to the different sectors that we are producing different goods or our products. Innovation was a very important value for us, and today it is. And today maybe it’s more than before also, in order to be profitable and [inaudible]. But always we have this idea that, OK, education is very important for people, and as [inaudible] for enterprise and for the community. But after the education, innovation is very important. Social responsibility is another value. And cooperation and solidarity with the community is very, very important. But innovation, it’s a very important feature inside Mondragon. And from the first ideas, Father Arizmendiarrieta had this idea to create the research center in order to help and to be independent from the American or German or Japanese technology. So we have to be—we don’t have to depend from different technologies. And, first of all, maybe they start buying the goods or buying the rights to produce, but at this moment, for example, we have at this moment 716 patents, worldwide patents, that give us the possibility to be independent from another high-technology companies or cities or countries. So, innovation is very important.

AMYGOODMAN: I was just speaking to lehendakari, the president of the Basque region, Patxi López, talking about Mondragon and its importance, one of the largest businesses in the Basque region. Can you talk, Mikel, about the Basque quality, if you will, of the Mondragon cooperative? I mean, why it grew out of the Basque region, for people outside of not only the Basque region, but Spain?

MIKELLEZAMIZ: OK, well, first of all, I have to tell you that I believe and we believe that everybody can create cooperatives, and it’s possible to create cooperatives, because, as you know, cooperatives idea, it didn’t start in Mondragon. Cooperatives started in the U.K., and before to the Basque Country, they were in France, in the States and wherever. But after that, what about the cooperative culture, what about the Basque culture connected with the cooperatives? And, OK, yes, we have in fact the internal, the political democracy. In the last 10 centuries also, it was here. They were more or less [inaudible] democracy, because in each town and in each provinces, we choose. But 10 centuries ago, we choose the—or they choose the boss or the—

AMYGOODMAN: The leader of the town.

MIKELLEZAMIZ: The leaders, OK. But also, today, we think that one of the very important features of the Basque region is the solidarity, in order to—in order to help each other. But this is not a paradise. The Basque Country is not a paradise. And Mondragon cooperatives is not a paradise. And we are not angels. And so, sometimes when we have to tighten the belt, people start having problems and speak, and we are very critical also about all the problems that we have. And so, I think that cooperatives is possible all over the world. Basque people are better than the others? No. We are normal people.

AMYGOODMAN: No, in fact, it didn’t rise out of a paradise; just the opposite. You’re talking about Spain during Franco’s years, and perhaps the most repressed area in Spain was the Basque region for Franco.

MIKELLEZAMIZ: Yes, that’s true.

AMYGOODMAN: The bombing of Guernica, for example—

MIKELLEZAMIZ: Yes, that’s true.

AMYGOODMAN: —in 1937, 75 years ago.

MIKELLEZAMIZ: And this kind of problems maybe gave us the possibility to work together and to be more in solidarity, more solidarity. And that will be one of the features that permit us to create this kind of a cooperative project maybe.

AMYGOODMAN: Mikel, can you talk about the response of small businesses in the area, because Mondragon is big now? It’s not just the alternative; it is the power here in Basque region in Spain. How many people work now for Mondragon cooperatives?

MIKELLEZAMIZ: Yes, in Mondragon cooperative groups, we have 83,000—83,000 workers, full time. And after, we have another 15,000 or 20,000 working part time, mostly in the supermarket. So, we are close to 100,000 workers altogether, full time and part time. And we have 120 cooperatives. So, cooperatives are not very big. But working together and with the close inter-cooperation that we have, we are now the best, the best now, the biggest, the biggest company in the Basque Country. And speaking about jobs and employment, we are the fourth biggest in Spain and among the seven biggest in sales.

AMYGOODMAN: And the largest cooperative in the world.

MIKELLEZAMIZ: OK, well, there are—well, but, for example, in U.K., they design a cooperative that the name is the Co-operative Group, that is a supermarket. And after that, they have some bank services and a funeral services. And they are, for example, 110,000 workers. In that case, it’s a consumer cooperative, so the consumers or the clients are their members. In our case is that we are the workers, and we are the members.

AMYGOODMAN: How do small businesses in Spain compete with Mondragon, now one of the largest businesses in Spain?

MIKELLEZAMIZ: OK, for us, the first market is not Spain. It’s Europe. So we are competing with—because we are selling at this moment 70 percent of our products all over the world. We are exporting to 150 different countries. And, for us, yes, the first foreign market is Europe. And also, Spain is important for us—yeah, that’s true. But I think that the other companies feel or think that, OK, we are working well, because we are working all together, because the most important feature or characteristic of Mondragon is that these 120 cooperatives, that are big and small cooperatives, are working together, and we set up one group, one corporation, but we pass people from one to the other cooperatives. We pass also money from one to the other cooperative. We pass cash, liquidity, from one to the other cooperatives, and also innovation. And that is very important in order to overcome the economic crisis. So in this moment, a lot of small companies also are thinking or think that Mondragon is going well because we can compete all over the world, because the internal amount of the exportation is very high and because we are overcoming much better than the others, in general, the crisis.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, that’s very interesting, the financial crisis and how it’s affected you. And I think this would be very interesting for people to hear in the United States. You have large banks in the United States that are only getting larger and only more profitable for the top managers, but are foreclosing on people’s houses at a very high rate, etc. How did Mondragon respond to the financial crisis, how you fared during these times?

MIKELLEZAMIZ: Yes, we believe that, first of all, yesterday we were 430 directors of Mondragon together in a congress that we set up every year, speaking of the future, about the challenge that we have for the next years. And we believe, there also, we were—we clever said that, OK, we are going to overcome the economic crisis because this inter-cooperation, the relation between cooperatives, because if one cooperative have some problems—

AMYGOODMAN: Give us an example of a cooperative, what it makes, and another cooperative, what it makes. And—

MIKELLEZAMIZ: For example, at this moment, we have 250 people relocated in another cooperative. They don’t have no jobs in their own cooperatives.

AMYGOODMAN: What was that cooperative doing? What was it making?

MIKELLEZAMIZ: No, different kind of cooperatives. For example, in the domestic appliances sector, from Fagor, that they are now suffering a big problem because the lack of construction in Spain, and in Europe also, because the economic crisis. And Fagor domestic appliances, they are selling for new apartments and also to repair, that does one. But in this case, Fagor is suffering this economic crisis, and some of these workers are working in another cooperative.

AMYGOODMAN: And what is that cooperative?

MIKELLEZAMIZ: For example, machine tools sectors, car components cooperatives. Yeah, in different cooperatives. And so, that is a very important idea. First of all, we are passing money, cash, liquidity, from one to the other cooperatives, because, as you know, the lack of liquidity from the banks, it’s very high. And some of our competitors are suffering. And some of them, they are going down and closing because this lack of liquidity. Now, we don’t have this kind of problem, because it’s very common to pass money from one to the other cooperatives, to pass liquidity, cash, from one to the other cooperatives, in order to overcome the economic crisis.

AMYGOODMAN: So here you are in Spain really actually thriving, certainly getting by, as Bankia, the largest bank conglomerate, has—is going under, involved in perhaps the biggest banking fraud in Spain’s history.

MIKELLEZAMIZ: And in fact, for example our cooperative bank, Caja Laboral, that is the second-biggest in the Basque Country, and in the north of Spain, from Madrid to the north of Spain, it’s the—among the second-, the third-biggest bank, is going very well. In fact, all the data that we have are, in general, much better than the banks on the—most of the banks. And it’s because, in this case, we—in the Basque Country, there is not so big a problem with the construction, because the problem of the real estate and the construction was more in the east part and the south part of Spain. Here, we are not—we don’t have this kind of problems connected also with the banks. And also, it’s because the bank also is more connected with industry. And as you know, the Basque Country is more industrial than the construction or than the others. It’s the most influence or the most important industrial area of Spain, the Basque Country.

AMYGOODMAN: Mikel, can you explain how the management structure works? What does it mean to say worker-owners?

MIKELLEZAMIZ: OK. Yes, we set up the most important things, therefore, in the cooperatives is the general assembly, the general assembly formed by all the workers that are the members of this cooperative. For example, going to Fagor domestic appliances, they are at this moment 2,500 workers, producing washing machine, dishwashers, the refrigerator, and then so on—2,500. And they set up at least once a year the general assembly in order to make the most important decision and decide the strategy, the annual report, and to approve the annual report, and then so on. And in this case, it’s the general assembly who makes the decision. But after that, we choose the governing council—the board of directors, you say—the governing council, that in the case of Fagor, they have 12 people—president, vice president, secretary and another nine. In the small cooperatives, there are maybe only three or maybe five, seven, nine; or being big, 12 people. And this governing council set up at least once a month in order to make the decision every month. And they choose the general manager, the CEO, in order to execute and to manage the company, and in this case, to propose the important decision. But it’s the governing council that makes the decision. It’s not the general manager. And after that, the general manager has the finance director, the people director, production director, marketing director, as they need.

AMYGOODMAN: And how do you share the profits?

MIKELLEZAMIZ: OK, from the gross profit in each cooperative, they have to put some money in the cooperative—in the corporate, Mondragon corporate corporation. So, for example, all the cooperatives has to put 10 percent of their gross profits in Mondragon investment fund. This investment fund is to create new cooperatives or to help the cooperatives to set up new business or for the internationalization. If one company needs to buy a factory in the States, or they want to create a new factory in the States, the cooperatives is going to put 60 percent of the investment, and 40 percent is put from this Mondragon investment fund. They have to put another 2 percent in Mondragon education, to help mostly to the university, Mondragon University, and another 2 percent in Mondragon solidarity fund. This is—this fund is in case of losses of each cooperative, solidarity fund. But after that, they have to pay their taxes. And after paying taxes, they have their net profits.

How we share the net profits: 10 percent should go, because by law it’s compulsory to do so, 10 percent goes to the fund of education and for the society. This is to help the children or the NGOs or support for the society. Each cooperative, they say how they are going to share this 10 percent. And after that, we send another 45 percent to the fund or reserve of cooperatives. This is to invest in the cooperatives to work every one all the year. And the other 45 percent are returns, returns to workers. But in this case, we don’t get these returns—these dividends, as you say; we say "returns"—because these returns is to work. And we don’t get these dividends in cash. We capitalize. So, everyone—we have the initial capital, and after that, all this capital, all these returns that we share between us, and I’ll get this money when I retire. But in the meantime, my company is using this capital, this investment, and that is another way of overcoming the economic crisis. One of the most important features of Mondragon is that 90 percent of the profits, we reinvest, because only 10 percent goes to the society directly, and the other 45 goes to the cooperatives to invest in new product and new machines and then so on, and the other 45 is my money, but that is inside the cooperatives, and the cooperatives invest. So, 90 percent of the profits, we reinvest in order to create employment.

AMYGOODMAN: Did you have to decide about job cuts or pay cuts during the crisis?

MIKELLEZAMIZ: We never fire any member of Mondragon—we never—in these 56 years, because we pass, and before of going unemployed, we pass from one to the other cooperatives. At this moment, only 250 are relocated. But before, I can remember that in 1991, ’92, ’93, that were a very high crisis, in that moment we had more than 2,000 people relocated in the other cooperatives in order to overcome the economic crisis. And after that, in 1994, we started growing, and now we are more than before.

AMYGOODMAN: Mikel, Mondragon has an actual MBA program for cooperatives?

MIKELLEZAMIZ: We have, yes. And I have already made it, the MBA, master’s business administration.

AMYGOODMAN: Where?

MIKELLEZAMIZ: In Mondragon University. In Otalora, in my case, I made it in Otalora. Otalora, it’s our management and cooperative training center that belongs to MCC, but the teachers are connected with the university, and the title is given by the university. But after that, there are another MBA in different universities also here—in Bilbao, for example—and in the public universities. And it’s possible to do the MBA in management, cooperative management.

AMYGOODMAN: Your wife teaches in Mondragon. She teaches kids. Does she teach a Mondragon philosophy of cooperatives? Do the kids learn about what it means to live in a cooperative way in school?

MIKELLEZAMIZ: OK, we don’t have any subjects specific with—that the name is "cooperative education," no. Only in the university, in the last year of the engineering school, but only in the engineering school, we have this subject that is cooperative education. But in the other [inaudible] schools, in the other faculties and also in the primary school and secondary school, we don’t have any subject that the name is "cooperative education." But we try to teach them and to educate them in cooperative values, cooperative values that are transpersonal values, not only the knowledge, but also we try to, for example, working together and giving them more and more autonomy, or giving them more and more participation possibility, because, for example, in the university, the students are members of the university. Not only the workers or not only the teachers and the staff are members; also the students—the students are the members, and after that, the companies, cooperatives. But also, conventional companies, they are not allowed, but all of them, they can be part of the university. And in this case, students are participating in the cooperatives. And after that, all the works they have to do, they work in groups. And so, the cooperative values, we try to implement, to integrate in each students working every day.

AMYGOODMAN: How do you deal with having to manufacture products outside of the cooperative? You have factories in other countries. Where are they?

MIKELLEZAMIZ: Yes, we have at this moment 77 factories overseas, all over the world. But mostly—most of them are in France and in Europe. But we have also in the States, in Brazil, Mexico, China, India. But—

AMYGOODMAN: Where in the United States?

MIKELLEZAMIZ: We’re in Arkansas, for example.

AMYGOODMAN: Arkansas.

MIKELLEZAMIZ: Little Rock, yes. And—but these companies, these factories, are not cooperatives yet. So, most of them, most of the workers that are abroad, are not members; they are employees. We have a plan, and we started before, two years before the economic crisis. We started with the pilot projects—one of these in Poland, another one in Mexico, and another one in Brazil—speaking with the trade unions, speaking with the workers, white-collar worker, blue-collar workers, and also with the administration, in order to give them the possibility to participate in property, so being ownership, in management and in results. But because the economic crisis, because this is a process, it’s a long process, and that it takes at least five years, and after two years, in 2008, start the economic crisis, and overseas, we have stopped. We have already started becoming cooperatives in Spain, in the Basque Country and in Spain, but not yet in the other parts of the world.

AMYGOODMAN: And where do you unions fit in? I mean, when you started during Franco’s time, unions were forbidden, and maybe Mondragon cooperative was an answer to that. But now, working with unions in this country and around the world?

MIKELLEZAMIZ: OK, well, we have—also here, we have good relation with the trade union. As you know, here in a cooperative, trade union don’t work, because it’s the general assembly of all the workers who makes the decision, the most important decision. And, for example, how much we are going to increase the salary or how much we are going to decrease the salary, it’s the general assembly who makes this kind of decision. But overseas, we speak with the trade union, because we have to—we have to be together and to work together in order to give them the possibility to understand what does it mean to work for cooperatives. And in this case, trade unions are important, and—but the most important, in order to convince all the trade union, all the workers, is a very important value that the name is transparency. Transparency is very important here, but also overseas and in a conventional factory. If we are transparent, giving to all the workers and to the trade union the possibility to know everything about the company, and making every month meetings to explain how is going the company and what is the strategy and what is the—how we see the future and then so on, that is the best way to integrate and to motivate everybody and also to understand from the union, trade union.

AMYGOODMAN: Mondragon International, one of the world’s largest worker cooperatives, starting to work with the United Steelworkers a few years ago, you announced an agreement with Mondragon to develop unionized worker cooperatives in the manufacturing sector in the U.S. How has that gone?

MIKELLEZAMIZ: OK, well, we have an agreement with them in order to work together or to help them to build or to create cooperatives or to become some worker-owned companies and cooperatives. We are working. We have a very good relation. Maybe it’s not easy to make steps quickly, because this kind of process, I told you before that it takes at least five years, because we have to change the culture, and it’s not easy to convince everybody. But we think that that is going well, slowly. But we think that it will be profitable for them, for us and for the world.

AMYGOODMAN: The United States, in the corporate media, capitalism is equated with democracy, so you question capitalism, you’re questioning democracy. Yet you provide an alternative to capitalism, the Mondragon cooperatives, where people live very well, and they—and no one has lost their jobs, you say. Explain how it works. Is this an alternative?

MIKELLEZAMIZ: We—always we say that we prefer to work in our own way. We don’t want to create conflicts between us and with the others and with the capitalists and then so on. We think that in this century, in this 21st century, that everybody has a lot of knowledge. Every worker, and so, at this moment, in most of the countries, that the workers are not illiterate. So, and they have a lot of information and a lot of training. Today, the management model, also the management system, should be more participative, more democratical, because everybody wants to—everybody knows a lot, and everybody can participate, and it will be much better for them. And in this case, we think that—we don’t say that it’s another way or—no, we say that this is good for everybody. If everybody can make their own decision, it’s much better for them and for the society, because, after that, the aims is not to resolve my own problems. We have to resolve—or we have to develop the society, because our mission is to create wealth within the society. Our mission is not to earn money. Our mission is to create wealth within the society.

How? Through entrepreneurial development and job creation. That is our aim. And in this case, we think that democracy is much better for everyone, if participation possibilities is much better for everybody. And trying to be in solidarity—and being in solidarity, we can develop the community. And for that reason, we think, OK, this is maybe another way, or not, but this is—we think that it’s a very human way, a better human way than another one. And we think that it’s possible to compete with everyone, being a cooperative and being ownership. And we think that in the future, in this 21st century, all the things, all the ways, all the affairs, also the business, should came to this idea of giving the participation possibility to everyone, and not to only one people or 10 people making the decision, and the others has to continue, has to work behind this decision.

AMYGOODMAN: The 99 percent?

MIKELLEZAMIZ: Ninety—yeah, or more. Why not? Yeah.

AMYGOODMAN: The wage differential between the highest paid in Mondragon and the lowest-paid workers, Mikel?

MIKELLEZAMIZ: In most of the cooperatives, the biggest differences between the top and the low is one to 4.5 times, 4.5 times. But the biggest, the CEO of Mondragon, is earning six times the minimum minimum salary.

AMYGOODMAN: Mikel Lezamiz, thank you so much for joining us.

MIKELLEZAMIZ: OK.

AMYGOODMAN: Mikel Lezamiz is the director of Mondragon Cooperative Dissemination. We’re speaking here in Busturia, Spain, in the Basque region, not far from Mondragon, where he works and lives. More than 100,000 people work in the Mondragon cooperatives. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.

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Mon, 25 Mar 2013 18:00:00 -0400VIDEO: Understanding the Mondragon Worker Cooperative Corporation in Spain's Basque Country Watch a 2012 interview Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman did with Mikel Lezamiz, director of Cooperative Dissemination at the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in Spain&#8217;s Basque Country. He described how the project relies on a participatory model in which the workers are the cooperative&#8217;s members.
AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I&#8217;m Amy Goodman. We&#8217;re in the Basque region of Spain, not far from one of the largest worker cooperatives in the world. It&#8217;s called Mondragon. And we&#8217;re joined right now by Mikel Lezamiz. He is director of Mondragon Cooperative Dissemination. We are sitting in his backyard in Busturia, Spain.
Welcome to Democracy Now! It&#8217;s great to have you with us. Explain what Mondragon is, how it got started.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Mondragon started in 1956, creating the first industrial cooperative. But before that, Father Arizmendiarrieta, the leader, the priest, who started with all the projects, started in 1943 creating the school, the technical school. And after that, the students of this school, he pushed to five people to create the first cooperative in 1956—the name at that time, Ulgor; today, Fagor.
AMY GOODMAN : And why did this priest want to start a cooperative? Talk about the political times here in Spain.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK. In that time, it was hard times after the civil war that finished in 1939. And Father Arizmendiarrieta went to Mondragon in order to be a priest, but he started with a school. And he wanted to—first of all, before to create the cooperative, he went to the biggest company in Mondragon to—with the directors, telling to give the possibility to all the workers to be part in management, in profits and being ownership. That was 1955. They didn&#8217;t assent him, and for that reason he pushed to some workers to set up their own cooperatives where everybody can participate in management, in profits and being ownership.
AMY GOODMAN : And these were graduates of the school that he had set up, the technical college.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : That&#8217;s true. They were engineers in that times, and they were working in that big company. But in the company, they didn&#8217;t assent, and for that reason he pushed to these five people to create their own projects. The idea was—and it is—that the workers, everybody, has to be the director or has to be the entrepreneur or has to be the person who makes the decision and not to work for anyone. So we have to part—we have to have parts in management, in profit and being ownership. That is the most essential idea. Before, there were a lot of ideas of the Catholic Church innovate to humanize the factories, to humanize the industrialization at that times. But Father Arizmendiarrieta was—went more than only humanizing. So he wanted to give the power to decide the future each one, not depending from another manager or another capitalist.
AMY GOODMAN : So these were very difficult years. Franco was in power. People felt marginalized. They didn&#8217;t have jobs. So this priest comes into this town, sets up a college, and then tries to set up this cooperative. But didn&#8217;t he need a bank to support it?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Yes. After three years—that was in 1959—so, they started the first cooperatives in 1956, and after, they create another three cooperatives. And Father Arizmendiarrieta had the idea that we have to set up the cooperative bank in order to create new cooperatives and to support the cooperatives with financial support. But not only with the financial, most very clever, creating the entrepreneurial division inside that cooperative bank in order to research the market and to decide, OK, which kind of jobs we can create, which kind of product we can produce. And after that, from this entrepreneurial division, we help—or, they help to create new cooperatives. And after the bank, the entrepreneurial—no, the bank division support financially, but it was a very good idea to create the bank with this entrepreneurial division to create new cooperatives.
AMY GOODMAN : Now explain, in these first years, what were the Mondragon cooperatives? What were they making? What were the products they were coming out with?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Yes, in Fagor, domestic appliances, they produced domestic appliances. But the first one was a cook. And—
AMY GOODMAN : A stove?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : A stove, a stove. And after that, they start producing the refrigerator, the washing machine and water central heatings. And now is the—
AMY GOODMAN : So why would people buy Mondragon products?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Because good quality and good price and good service. I think that all over the world and everybody buy because good quality and price and service. Sometimes you can buy because philosophy, but no, but if you have a bad quality or it&#8217;s more expensive, you don&#8217;t want to buy. So, for that reason, we always—we are trained to produce always with quality, train to give the best price, you know, to permit to everybody to buy this kind of good for their house. And after that, we have to give the good service.
AMY GOODMAN : Now, people probably, if they&#8217;ve heard of co-ops, have heard of food co-ops, where a community gathers together, and they provide a couple of hours a week to make a cooperative work, and that&#8217;s a lot of human effort. But Mondragon is also highly technological. You are making products. Can you talk about how you came to be on the cutting edge of technology? It wasn&#8217;t just people working in a good-natured way, in a cooperative way together.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Yes. In fact, we have at this moment 14 research and development centers, in order to help to the different sectors that we are producing different goods or our products. Innovation was a very important value for us, and today it is. And today maybe it&#8217;s more than before also, in order to be profitable and [inaudible]. But always we have this idea that, OK, education is very important for people, and as [inaudible] for enterprise and for the community. But after the education, innovation is very important. Social responsibility is another value. And cooperation and solidarity with the community is very, very important. But innovation, it&#8217;s a very important feature inside Mondragon. And from the first ideas, Father Arizmendiarrieta had this idea to create the research center in order to help and to be independent from the American or German or Japanese technology. So we have to be—we don&#8217;t have to depend from different technologies. And, first of all, maybe they start buying the goods or buying the rights to produce, but at this moment, for example, we have at this moment 716 patents, worldwide patents, that give us the possibility to be independent from another high-technology companies or cities or countries. So, innovation is very important.
AMY GOODMAN : I was just speaking to lehendakari , the president of the Basque region, Patxi López, talking about Mondragon and its importance, one of the largest businesses in the Basque region. Can you talk, Mikel, about the Basque quality, if you will, of the Mondragon cooperative? I mean, why it grew out of the Basque region, for people outside of not only the Basque region, but Spain?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK, well, first of all, I have to tell you that I believe and we believe that everybody can create cooperatives, and it&#8217;s possible to create cooperatives, because, as you know, cooperatives idea, it didn&#8217;t start in Mondragon. Cooperatives started in the U.K., and before to the Basque Country, they were in France, in the States and wherever. But after that, what about the cooperative culture, what about the Basque culture connected with the cooperatives? And, OK, yes, we have in fact the internal, the political democracy. In the last 10 centuries also, it was here. They were more or less [inaudible] democracy, because in each town and in each provinces, we choose. But 10 centuries ago, we choose the—or they choose the boss or the—
AMY GOODMAN : The leader of the town.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : The leaders, OK. But also, today, we think that one of the very important features of the Basque region is the solidarity, in order to—in order to help each other. But this is not a paradise. The Basque Country is not a paradise. And Mondragon cooperatives is not a paradise. And we are not angels. And so, sometimes when we have to tighten the belt, people start having problems and speak, and we are very critical also about all the problems that we have. And so, I think that cooperatives is possible all over the world. Basque people are better than the others? No. We are normal people.
AMY GOODMAN : No, in fact, it didn&#8217;t rise out of a paradise; just the opposite. You&#8217;re talking about Spain during Franco&#8217;s years, and perhaps the most repressed area in Spain was the Basque region for Franco.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Yes, that&#8217;s true.
AMY GOODMAN : The bombing of Guernica, for example—
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Yes, that&#8217;s true.
AMY GOODMAN : —in 1937, 75 years ago.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : And this kind of problems maybe gave us the possibility to work together and to be more in solidarity, more solidarity. And that will be one of the features that permit us to create this kind of a cooperative project maybe.
AMY GOODMAN : Mikel, can you talk about the response of small businesses in the area, because Mondragon is big now? It&#8217;s not just the alternative; it is the power here in Basque region in Spain. How many people work now for Mondragon cooperatives?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Yes, in Mondragon cooperative groups, we have 83,000—83,000 workers, full time. And after, we have another 15,000 or 20,000 working part time, mostly in the supermarket. So, we are close to 100,000 workers altogether, full time and part time. And we have 120 cooperatives. So, cooperatives are not very big. But working together and with the close inter-cooperation that we have, we are now the best, the best now, the biggest, the biggest company in the Basque Country. And speaking about jobs and employment, we are the fourth biggest in Spain and among the seven biggest in sales.
AMY GOODMAN : And the largest cooperative in the world.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK, well, there are—well, but, for example, in U.K., they design a cooperative that the name is the Co-operative Group, that is a supermarket. And after that, they have some bank services and a funeral services. And they are, for example, 110,000 workers. In that case, it&#8217;s a consumer cooperative, so the consumers or the clients are their members. In our case is that we are the workers, and we are the members.
AMY GOODMAN : How do small businesses in Spain compete with Mondragon, now one of the largest businesses in Spain?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK, for us, the first market is not Spain. It&#8217;s Europe. So we are competing with—because we are selling at this moment 70 percent of our products all over the world. We are exporting to 150 different countries. And, for us, yes, the first foreign market is Europe. And also, Spain is important for us—yeah, that&#8217;s true. But I think that the other companies feel or think that, OK, we are working well, because we are working all together, because the most important feature or characteristic of Mondragon is that these 120 cooperatives, that are big and small cooperatives, are working together, and we set up one group, one corporation, but we pass people from one to the other cooperatives. We pass also money from one to the other cooperative. We pass cash, liquidity, from one to the other cooperatives, and also innovation. And that is very important in order to overcome the economic crisis. So in this moment, a lot of small companies also are thinking or think that Mondragon is going well because we can compete all over the world, because the internal amount of the exportation is very high and because we are overcoming much better than the others, in general, the crisis.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, that&#8217;s very interesting, the financial crisis and how it&#8217;s affected you. And I think this would be very interesting for people to hear in the United States. You have large banks in the United States that are only getting larger and only more profitable for the top managers, but are foreclosing on people&#8217;s houses at a very high rate, etc. How did Mondragon respond to the financial crisis, how you fared during these times?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Yes, we believe that, first of all, yesterday we were 430 directors of Mondragon together in a congress that we set up every year, speaking of the future, about the challenge that we have for the next years. And we believe, there also, we were—we clever said that, OK, we are going to overcome the economic crisis because this inter-cooperation, the relation between cooperatives, because if one cooperative have some problems—
AMY GOODMAN : Give us an example of a cooperative, what it makes, and another cooperative, what it makes. And—
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : For example, at this moment, we have 250 people relocated in another cooperative. They don&#8217;t have no jobs in their own cooperatives.
AMY GOODMAN : What was that cooperative doing? What was it making?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : No, different kind of cooperatives. For example, in the domestic appliances sector, from Fagor, that they are now suffering a big problem because the lack of construction in Spain, and in Europe also, because the economic crisis. And Fagor domestic appliances, they are selling for new apartments and also to repair, that does one. But in this case, Fagor is suffering this economic crisis, and some of these workers are working in another cooperative.
AMY GOODMAN : And what is that cooperative?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : For example, machine tools sectors, car components cooperatives. Yeah, in different cooperatives. And so, that is a very important idea. First of all, we are passing money, cash, liquidity, from one to the other cooperatives, because, as you know, the lack of liquidity from the banks, it&#8217;s very high. And some of our competitors are suffering. And some of them, they are going down and closing because this lack of liquidity. Now, we don&#8217;t have this kind of problem, because it&#8217;s very common to pass money from one to the other cooperatives, to pass liquidity, cash, from one to the other cooperatives, in order to overcome the economic crisis.
AMY GOODMAN : So here you are in Spain really actually thriving, certainly getting by, as Bankia, the largest bank conglomerate, has—is going under, involved in perhaps the biggest banking fraud in Spain&#8217;s history.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : And in fact, for example our cooperative bank, Caja Laboral, that is the second-biggest in the Basque Country, and in the north of Spain, from Madrid to the north of Spain, it&#8217;s the—among the second-, the third-biggest bank, is going very well. In fact, all the data that we have are, in general, much better than the banks on the—most of the banks. And it&#8217;s because, in this case, we—in the Basque Country, there is not so big a problem with the construction, because the problem of the real estate and the construction was more in the east part and the south part of Spain. Here, we are not—we don&#8217;t have this kind of problems connected also with the banks. And also, it&#8217;s because the bank also is more connected with industry. And as you know, the Basque Country is more industrial than the construction or than the others. It&#8217;s the most influence or the most important industrial area of Spain, the Basque Country.
AMY GOODMAN : Mikel, can you explain how the management structure works? What does it mean to say worker-owners?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK. Yes, we set up the most important things, therefore, in the cooperatives is the general assembly, the general assembly formed by all the workers that are the members of this cooperative. For example, going to Fagor domestic appliances, they are at this moment 2,500 workers, producing washing machine, dishwashers, the refrigerator, and then so on—2,500. And they set up at least once a year the general assembly in order to make the most important decision and decide the strategy, the annual report, and to approve the annual report, and then so on. And in this case, it&#8217;s the general assembly who makes the decision. But after that, we choose the governing council—the board of directors, you say—the governing council, that in the case of Fagor, they have 12 people—president, vice president, secretary and another nine. In the small cooperatives, there are maybe only three or maybe five, seven, nine; or being big, 12 people. And this governing council set up at least once a month in order to make the decision every month. And they choose the general manager, the CEO , in order to execute and to manage the company, and in this case, to propose the important decision. But it&#8217;s the governing council that makes the decision. It&#8217;s not the general manager. And after that, the general manager has the finance director, the people director, production director, marketing director, as they need.
AMY GOODMAN : And how do you share the profits?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK, from the gross profit in each cooperative, they have to put some money in the cooperative—in the corporate, Mondragon corporate corporation. So, for example, all the cooperatives has to put 10 percent of their gross profits in Mondragon investment fund. This investment fund is to create new cooperatives or to help the cooperatives to set up new business or for the internationalization. If one company needs to buy a factory in the States, or they want to create a new factory in the States, the cooperatives is going to put 60 percent of the investment, and 40 percent is put from this Mondragon investment fund. They have to put another 2 percent in Mondragon education, to help mostly to the university, Mondragon University, and another 2 percent in Mondragon solidarity fund. This is—this fund is in case of losses of each cooperative, solidarity fund. But after that, they have to pay their taxes. And after paying taxes, they have their net profits.
How we share the net profits: 10 percent should go, because by law it&#8217;s compulsory to do so, 10 percent goes to the fund of education and for the society. This is to help the children or the NGOs or support for the society. Each cooperative, they say how they are going to share this 10 percent. And after that, we send another 45 percent to the fund or reserve of cooperatives. This is to invest in the cooperatives to work every one all the year. And the other 45 percent are returns, returns to workers. But in this case, we don&#8217;t get these returns—these dividends, as you say; we say &quot;returns&quot;—because these returns is to work. And we don&#8217;t get these dividends in cash. We capitalize. So, everyone—we have the initial capital, and after that, all this capital, all these returns that we share between us, and I&#8217;ll get this money when I retire. But in the meantime, my company is using this capital, this investment, and that is another way of overcoming the economic crisis. One of the most important features of Mondragon is that 90 percent of the profits, we reinvest, because only 10 percent goes to the society directly, and the other 45 goes to the cooperatives to invest in new product and new machines and then so on, and the other 45 is my money, but that is inside the cooperatives, and the cooperatives invest. So, 90 percent of the profits, we reinvest in order to create employment.
AMY GOODMAN : Did you have to decide about job cuts or pay cuts during the crisis?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : We never fire any member of Mondragon—we never—in these 56 years, because we pass, and before of going unemployed, we pass from one to the other cooperatives. At this moment, only 250 are relocated. But before, I can remember that in 1991, &#8217;92, &#8217;93, that were a very high crisis, in that moment we had more than 2,000 people relocated in the other cooperatives in order to overcome the economic crisis. And after that, in 1994, we started growing, and now we are more than before.
AMY GOODMAN : Mikel, Mondragon has an actual MBA program for cooperatives?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : We have, yes. And I have already made it, the MBA , master&#8217;s business administration.
AMY GOODMAN : Where?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : In Mondragon University. In Otalora, in my case, I made it in Otalora. Otalora, it&#8217;s our management and cooperative training center that belongs to MCC , but the teachers are connected with the university, and the title is given by the university. But after that, there are another MBA in different universities also here—in Bilbao, for example—and in the public universities. And it&#8217;s possible to do the MBA in management, cooperative management.
AMY GOODMAN : Your wife teaches in Mondragon. She teaches kids. Does she teach a Mondragon philosophy of cooperatives? Do the kids learn about what it means to live in a cooperative way in school?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK, we don&#8217;t have any subjects specific with—that the name is &quot;cooperative education,&quot; no. Only in the university, in the last year of the engineering school, but only in the engineering school, we have this subject that is cooperative education. But in the other [inaudible] schools, in the other faculties and also in the primary school and secondary school, we don&#8217;t have any subject that the name is &quot;cooperative education.&quot; But we try to teach them and to educate them in cooperative values, cooperative values that are transpersonal values, not only the knowledge, but also we try to, for example, working together and giving them more and more autonomy, or giving them more and more participation possibility, because, for example, in the university, the students are members of the university. Not only the workers or not only the teachers and the staff are members; also the students—the students are the members, and after that, the companies, cooperatives. But also, conventional companies, they are not allowed, but all of them, they can be part of the university. And in this case, students are participating in the cooperatives. And after that, all the works they have to do, they work in groups. And so, the cooperative values, we try to implement, to integrate in each students working every day.
AMY GOODMAN : How do you deal with having to manufacture products outside of the cooperative? You have factories in other countries. Where are they?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Yes, we have at this moment 77 factories overseas, all over the world. But mostly—most of them are in France and in Europe. But we have also in the States, in Brazil, Mexico, China, India. But—
AMY GOODMAN : Where in the United States?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : We&#8217;re in Arkansas, for example.
AMY GOODMAN : Arkansas.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Little Rock, yes. And—but these companies, these factories, are not cooperatives yet. So, most of them, most of the workers that are abroad, are not members; they are employees. We have a plan, and we started before, two years before the economic crisis. We started with the pilot projects—one of these in Poland, another one in Mexico, and another one in Brazil—speaking with the trade unions, speaking with the workers, white-collar worker, blue-collar workers, and also with the administration, in order to give them the possibility to participate in property, so being ownership, in management and in results. But because the economic crisis, because this is a process, it&#8217;s a long process, and that it takes at least five years, and after two years, in 2008, start the economic crisis, and overseas, we have stopped. We have already started becoming cooperatives in Spain, in the Basque Country and in Spain, but not yet in the other parts of the world.
AMY GOODMAN : And where do you unions fit in? I mean, when you started during Franco&#8217;s time, unions were forbidden, and maybe Mondragon cooperative was an answer to that. But now, working with unions in this country and around the world?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK, well, we have—also here, we have good relation with the trade union. As you know, here in a cooperative, trade union don&#8217;t work, because it&#8217;s the general assembly of all the workers who makes the decision, the most important decision. And, for example, how much we are going to increase the salary or how much we are going to decrease the salary, it&#8217;s the general assembly who makes this kind of decision. But overseas, we speak with the trade union, because we have to—we have to be together and to work together in order to give them the possibility to understand what does it mean to work for cooperatives. And in this case, trade unions are important, and—but the most important, in order to convince all the trade union, all the workers, is a very important value that the name is transparency. Transparency is very important here, but also overseas and in a conventional factory. If we are transparent, giving to all the workers and to the trade union the possibility to know everything about the company, and making every month meetings to explain how is going the company and what is the strategy and what is the—how we see the future and then so on, that is the best way to integrate and to motivate everybody and also to understand from the union, trade union.
AMY GOODMAN : Mondragon International, one of the world&#8217;s largest worker cooperatives, starting to work with the United Steelworkers a few years ago, you announced an agreement with Mondragon to develop unionized worker cooperatives in the manufacturing sector in the U.S. How has that gone?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK, well, we have an agreement with them in order to work together or to help them to build or to create cooperatives or to become some worker-owned companies and cooperatives. We are working. We have a very good relation. Maybe it&#8217;s not easy to make steps quickly, because this kind of process, I told you before that it takes at least five years, because we have to change the culture, and it&#8217;s not easy to convince everybody. But we think that that is going well, slowly. But we think that it will be profitable for them, for us and for the world.
AMY GOODMAN : The United States, in the corporate media, capitalism is equated with democracy, so you question capitalism, you&#8217;re questioning democracy. Yet you provide an alternative to capitalism, the Mondragon cooperatives, where people live very well, and they—and no one has lost their jobs, you say. Explain how it works. Is this an alternative?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : We—always we say that we prefer to work in our own way. We don&#8217;t want to create conflicts between us and with the others and with the capitalists and then so on. We think that in this century, in this 21st century, that everybody has a lot of knowledge. Every worker, and so, at this moment, in most of the countries, that the workers are not illiterate. So, and they have a lot of information and a lot of training. Today, the management model, also the management system, should be more participative, more democratical, because everybody wants to—everybody knows a lot, and everybody can participate, and it will be much better for them. And in this case, we think that—we don&#8217;t say that it&#8217;s another way or—no, we say that this is good for everybody. If everybody can make their own decision, it&#8217;s much better for them and for the society, because, after that, the aims is not to resolve my own problems. We have to resolve—or we have to develop the society, because our mission is to create wealth within the society. Our mission is not to earn money. Our mission is to create wealth within the society.
How? Through entrepreneurial development and job creation. That is our aim. And in this case, we think that democracy is much better for everyone, if participation possibilities is much better for everybody. And trying to be in solidarity—and being in solidarity, we can develop the community. And for that reason, we think, OK, this is maybe another way, or not, but this is—we think that it&#8217;s a very human way, a better human way than another one. And we think that it&#8217;s possible to compete with everyone, being a cooperative and being ownership. And we think that in the future, in this 21st century, all the things, all the ways, all the affairs, also the business, should came to this idea of giving the participation possibility to everyone, and not to only one people or 10 people making the decision, and the others has to continue, has to work behind this decision.
AMY GOODMAN : The 99 percent?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Ninety—yeah, or more. Why not? Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : The wage differential between the highest paid in Mondragon and the lowest-paid workers, Mikel?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : In most of the cooperatives, the biggest differences between the top and the low is one to 4.5 times, 4.5 times. But the biggest, the CEO of Mondragon, is earning six times the minimum minimum salary.
AMY GOODMAN : Mikel Lezamiz, thank you so much for joining us.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK.
AMY GOODMAN : Mikel Lezamiz is the director of Mondragon Cooperative Dissemination. We&#8217;re speaking here in Busturia, Spain, in the Basque region, not far from Mondragon, where he works and lives. More than 100,000 people work in the Mondragon cooperatives. This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . nonadulttv-gDemocracy Now!NewsVIDEO: Understanding the Mondragon Worker Cooperative Corporation in Spain's Basque Country Watch a 2012 interview Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman did with Mikel Lezamiz, director of Cooperative Dissemination at the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in Spain&#8217;s Basque Country. He described how the project relies on a participatory model in which the workers are the cooperative&#8217;s members.
AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I&#8217;m Amy Goodman. We&#8217;re in the Basque region of Spain, not far from one of the largest worker cooperatives in the world. It&#8217;s called Mondragon. And we&#8217;re joined right now by Mikel Lezamiz. He is director of Mondragon Cooperative Dissemination. We are sitting in his backyard in Busturia, Spain.
Welcome to Democracy Now! It&#8217;s great to have you with us. Explain what Mondragon is, how it got started.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Mondragon started in 1956, creating the first industrial cooperative. But before that, Father Arizmendiarrieta, the leader, the priest, who started with all the projects, started in 1943 creating the school, the technical school. And after that, the students of this school, he pushed to five people to create the first cooperative in 1956—the name at that time, Ulgor; today, Fagor.
AMY GOODMAN : And why did this priest want to start a cooperative? Talk about the political times here in Spain.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK. In that time, it was hard times after the civil war that finished in 1939. And Father Arizmendiarrieta went to Mondragon in order to be a priest, but he started with a school. And he wanted to—first of all, before to create the cooperative, he went to the biggest company in Mondragon to—with the directors, telling to give the possibility to all the workers to be part in management, in profits and being ownership. That was 1955. They didn&#8217;t assent him, and for that reason he pushed to some workers to set up their own cooperatives where everybody can participate in management, in profits and being ownership.
AMY GOODMAN : And these were graduates of the school that he had set up, the technical college.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : That&#8217;s true. They were engineers in that times, and they were working in that big company. But in the company, they didn&#8217;t assent, and for that reason he pushed to these five people to create their own projects. The idea was—and it is—that the workers, everybody, has to be the director or has to be the entrepreneur or has to be the person who makes the decision and not to work for anyone. So we have to part—we have to have parts in management, in profit and being ownership. That is the most essential idea. Before, there were a lot of ideas of the Catholic Church innovate to humanize the factories, to humanize the industrialization at that times. But Father Arizmendiarrieta was—went more than only humanizing. So he wanted to give the power to decide the future each one, not depending from another manager or another capitalist.
AMY GOODMAN : So these were very difficult years. Franco was in power. People felt marginalized. They didn&#8217;t have jobs. So this priest comes into this town, sets up a college, and then tries to set up this cooperative. But didn&#8217;t he need a bank to support it?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Yes. After three years—that was in 1959—so, they started the first cooperatives in 1956, and after, they create another three cooperatives. And Father Arizmendiarrieta had the idea that we have to set up the cooperative bank in order to create new cooperatives and to support the cooperatives with financial support. But not only with the financial, most very clever, creating the entrepreneurial division inside that cooperative bank in order to research the market and to decide, OK, which kind of jobs we can create, which kind of product we can produce. And after that, from this entrepreneurial division, we help—or, they help to create new cooperatives. And after the bank, the entrepreneurial—no, the bank division support financially, but it was a very good idea to create the bank with this entrepreneurial division to create new cooperatives.
AMY GOODMAN : Now explain, in these first years, what were the Mondragon cooperatives? What were they making? What were the products they were coming out with?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Yes, in Fagor, domestic appliances, they produced domestic appliances. But the first one was a cook. And—
AMY GOODMAN : A stove?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : A stove, a stove. And after that, they start producing the refrigerator, the washing machine and water central heatings. And now is the—
AMY GOODMAN : So why would people buy Mondragon products?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Because good quality and good price and good service. I think that all over the world and everybody buy because good quality and price and service. Sometimes you can buy because philosophy, but no, but if you have a bad quality or it&#8217;s more expensive, you don&#8217;t want to buy. So, for that reason, we always—we are trained to produce always with quality, train to give the best price, you know, to permit to everybody to buy this kind of good for their house. And after that, we have to give the good service.
AMY GOODMAN : Now, people probably, if they&#8217;ve heard of co-ops, have heard of food co-ops, where a community gathers together, and they provide a couple of hours a week to make a cooperative work, and that&#8217;s a lot of human effort. But Mondragon is also highly technological. You are making products. Can you talk about how you came to be on the cutting edge of technology? It wasn&#8217;t just people working in a good-natured way, in a cooperative way together.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Yes. In fact, we have at this moment 14 research and development centers, in order to help to the different sectors that we are producing different goods or our products. Innovation was a very important value for us, and today it is. And today maybe it&#8217;s more than before also, in order to be profitable and [inaudible]. But always we have this idea that, OK, education is very important for people, and as [inaudible] for enterprise and for the community. But after the education, innovation is very important. Social responsibility is another value. And cooperation and solidarity with the community is very, very important. But innovation, it&#8217;s a very important feature inside Mondragon. And from the first ideas, Father Arizmendiarrieta had this idea to create the research center in order to help and to be independent from the American or German or Japanese technology. So we have to be—we don&#8217;t have to depend from different technologies. And, first of all, maybe they start buying the goods or buying the rights to produce, but at this moment, for example, we have at this moment 716 patents, worldwide patents, that give us the possibility to be independent from another high-technology companies or cities or countries. So, innovation is very important.
AMY GOODMAN : I was just speaking to lehendakari , the president of the Basque region, Patxi López, talking about Mondragon and its importance, one of the largest businesses in the Basque region. Can you talk, Mikel, about the Basque quality, if you will, of the Mondragon cooperative? I mean, why it grew out of the Basque region, for people outside of not only the Basque region, but Spain?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK, well, first of all, I have to tell you that I believe and we believe that everybody can create cooperatives, and it&#8217;s possible to create cooperatives, because, as you know, cooperatives idea, it didn&#8217;t start in Mondragon. Cooperatives started in the U.K., and before to the Basque Country, they were in France, in the States and wherever. But after that, what about the cooperative culture, what about the Basque culture connected with the cooperatives? And, OK, yes, we have in fact the internal, the political democracy. In the last 10 centuries also, it was here. They were more or less [inaudible] democracy, because in each town and in each provinces, we choose. But 10 centuries ago, we choose the—or they choose the boss or the—
AMY GOODMAN : The leader of the town.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : The leaders, OK. But also, today, we think that one of the very important features of the Basque region is the solidarity, in order to—in order to help each other. But this is not a paradise. The Basque Country is not a paradise. And Mondragon cooperatives is not a paradise. And we are not angels. And so, sometimes when we have to tighten the belt, people start having problems and speak, and we are very critical also about all the problems that we have. And so, I think that cooperatives is possible all over the world. Basque people are better than the others? No. We are normal people.
AMY GOODMAN : No, in fact, it didn&#8217;t rise out of a paradise; just the opposite. You&#8217;re talking about Spain during Franco&#8217;s years, and perhaps the most repressed area in Spain was the Basque region for Franco.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Yes, that&#8217;s true.
AMY GOODMAN : The bombing of Guernica, for example—
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Yes, that&#8217;s true.
AMY GOODMAN : —in 1937, 75 years ago.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : And this kind of problems maybe gave us the possibility to work together and to be more in solidarity, more solidarity. And that will be one of the features that permit us to create this kind of a cooperative project maybe.
AMY GOODMAN : Mikel, can you talk about the response of small businesses in the area, because Mondragon is big now? It&#8217;s not just the alternative; it is the power here in Basque region in Spain. How many people work now for Mondragon cooperatives?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Yes, in Mondragon cooperative groups, we have 83,000—83,000 workers, full time. And after, we have another 15,000 or 20,000 working part time, mostly in the supermarket. So, we are close to 100,000 workers altogether, full time and part time. And we have 120 cooperatives. So, cooperatives are not very big. But working together and with the close inter-cooperation that we have, we are now the best, the best now, the biggest, the biggest company in the Basque Country. And speaking about jobs and employment, we are the fourth biggest in Spain and among the seven biggest in sales.
AMY GOODMAN : And the largest cooperative in the world.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK, well, there are—well, but, for example, in U.K., they design a cooperative that the name is the Co-operative Group, that is a supermarket. And after that, they have some bank services and a funeral services. And they are, for example, 110,000 workers. In that case, it&#8217;s a consumer cooperative, so the consumers or the clients are their members. In our case is that we are the workers, and we are the members.
AMY GOODMAN : How do small businesses in Spain compete with Mondragon, now one of the largest businesses in Spain?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK, for us, the first market is not Spain. It&#8217;s Europe. So we are competing with—because we are selling at this moment 70 percent of our products all over the world. We are exporting to 150 different countries. And, for us, yes, the first foreign market is Europe. And also, Spain is important for us—yeah, that&#8217;s true. But I think that the other companies feel or think that, OK, we are working well, because we are working all together, because the most important feature or characteristic of Mondragon is that these 120 cooperatives, that are big and small cooperatives, are working together, and we set up one group, one corporation, but we pass people from one to the other cooperatives. We pass also money from one to the other cooperative. We pass cash, liquidity, from one to the other cooperatives, and also innovation. And that is very important in order to overcome the economic crisis. So in this moment, a lot of small companies also are thinking or think that Mondragon is going well because we can compete all over the world, because the internal amount of the exportation is very high and because we are overcoming much better than the others, in general, the crisis.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, that&#8217;s very interesting, the financial crisis and how it&#8217;s affected you. And I think this would be very interesting for people to hear in the United States. You have large banks in the United States that are only getting larger and only more profitable for the top managers, but are foreclosing on people&#8217;s houses at a very high rate, etc. How did Mondragon respond to the financial crisis, how you fared during these times?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Yes, we believe that, first of all, yesterday we were 430 directors of Mondragon together in a congress that we set up every year, speaking of the future, about the challenge that we have for the next years. And we believe, there also, we were—we clever said that, OK, we are going to overcome the economic crisis because this inter-cooperation, the relation between cooperatives, because if one cooperative have some problems—
AMY GOODMAN : Give us an example of a cooperative, what it makes, and another cooperative, what it makes. And—
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : For example, at this moment, we have 250 people relocated in another cooperative. They don&#8217;t have no jobs in their own cooperatives.
AMY GOODMAN : What was that cooperative doing? What was it making?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : No, different kind of cooperatives. For example, in the domestic appliances sector, from Fagor, that they are now suffering a big problem because the lack of construction in Spain, and in Europe also, because the economic crisis. And Fagor domestic appliances, they are selling for new apartments and also to repair, that does one. But in this case, Fagor is suffering this economic crisis, and some of these workers are working in another cooperative.
AMY GOODMAN : And what is that cooperative?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : For example, machine tools sectors, car components cooperatives. Yeah, in different cooperatives. And so, that is a very important idea. First of all, we are passing money, cash, liquidity, from one to the other cooperatives, because, as you know, the lack of liquidity from the banks, it&#8217;s very high. And some of our competitors are suffering. And some of them, they are going down and closing because this lack of liquidity. Now, we don&#8217;t have this kind of problem, because it&#8217;s very common to pass money from one to the other cooperatives, to pass liquidity, cash, from one to the other cooperatives, in order to overcome the economic crisis.
AMY GOODMAN : So here you are in Spain really actually thriving, certainly getting by, as Bankia, the largest bank conglomerate, has—is going under, involved in perhaps the biggest banking fraud in Spain&#8217;s history.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : And in fact, for example our cooperative bank, Caja Laboral, that is the second-biggest in the Basque Country, and in the north of Spain, from Madrid to the north of Spain, it&#8217;s the—among the second-, the third-biggest bank, is going very well. In fact, all the data that we have are, in general, much better than the banks on the—most of the banks. And it&#8217;s because, in this case, we—in the Basque Country, there is not so big a problem with the construction, because the problem of the real estate and the construction was more in the east part and the south part of Spain. Here, we are not—we don&#8217;t have this kind of problems connected also with the banks. And also, it&#8217;s because the bank also is more connected with industry. And as you know, the Basque Country is more industrial than the construction or than the others. It&#8217;s the most influence or the most important industrial area of Spain, the Basque Country.
AMY GOODMAN : Mikel, can you explain how the management structure works? What does it mean to say worker-owners?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK. Yes, we set up the most important things, therefore, in the cooperatives is the general assembly, the general assembly formed by all the workers that are the members of this cooperative. For example, going to Fagor domestic appliances, they are at this moment 2,500 workers, producing washing machine, dishwashers, the refrigerator, and then so on—2,500. And they set up at least once a year the general assembly in order to make the most important decision and decide the strategy, the annual report, and to approve the annual report, and then so on. And in this case, it&#8217;s the general assembly who makes the decision. But after that, we choose the governing council—the board of directors, you say—the governing council, that in the case of Fagor, they have 12 people—president, vice president, secretary and another nine. In the small cooperatives, there are maybe only three or maybe five, seven, nine; or being big, 12 people. And this governing council set up at least once a month in order to make the decision every month. And they choose the general manager, the CEO , in order to execute and to manage the company, and in this case, to propose the important decision. But it&#8217;s the governing council that makes the decision. It&#8217;s not the general manager. And after that, the general manager has the finance director, the people director, production director, marketing director, as they need.
AMY GOODMAN : And how do you share the profits?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK, from the gross profit in each cooperative, they have to put some money in the cooperative—in the corporate, Mondragon corporate corporation. So, for example, all the cooperatives has to put 10 percent of their gross profits in Mondragon investment fund. This investment fund is to create new cooperatives or to help the cooperatives to set up new business or for the internationalization. If one company needs to buy a factory in the States, or they want to create a new factory in the States, the cooperatives is going to put 60 percent of the investment, and 40 percent is put from this Mondragon investment fund. They have to put another 2 percent in Mondragon education, to help mostly to the university, Mondragon University, and another 2 percent in Mondragon solidarity fund. This is—this fund is in case of losses of each cooperative, solidarity fund. But after that, they have to pay their taxes. And after paying taxes, they have their net profits.
How we share the net profits: 10 percent should go, because by law it&#8217;s compulsory to do so, 10 percent goes to the fund of education and for the society. This is to help the children or the NGOs or support for the society. Each cooperative, they say how they are going to share this 10 percent. And after that, we send another 45 percent to the fund or reserve of cooperatives. This is to invest in the cooperatives to work every one all the year. And the other 45 percent are returns, returns to workers. But in this case, we don&#8217;t get these returns—these dividends, as you say; we say &quot;returns&quot;—because these returns is to work. And we don&#8217;t get these dividends in cash. We capitalize. So, everyone—we have the initial capital, and after that, all this capital, all these returns that we share between us, and I&#8217;ll get this money when I retire. But in the meantime, my company is using this capital, this investment, and that is another way of overcoming the economic crisis. One of the most important features of Mondragon is that 90 percent of the profits, we reinvest, because only 10 percent goes to the society directly, and the other 45 goes to the cooperatives to invest in new product and new machines and then so on, and the other 45 is my money, but that is inside the cooperatives, and the cooperatives invest. So, 90 percent of the profits, we reinvest in order to create employment.
AMY GOODMAN : Did you have to decide about job cuts or pay cuts during the crisis?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : We never fire any member of Mondragon—we never—in these 56 years, because we pass, and before of going unemployed, we pass from one to the other cooperatives. At this moment, only 250 are relocated. But before, I can remember that in 1991, &#8217;92, &#8217;93, that were a very high crisis, in that moment we had more than 2,000 people relocated in the other cooperatives in order to overcome the economic crisis. And after that, in 1994, we started growing, and now we are more than before.
AMY GOODMAN : Mikel, Mondragon has an actual MBA program for cooperatives?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : We have, yes. And I have already made it, the MBA , master&#8217;s business administration.
AMY GOODMAN : Where?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : In Mondragon University. In Otalora, in my case, I made it in Otalora. Otalora, it&#8217;s our management and cooperative training center that belongs to MCC , but the teachers are connected with the university, and the title is given by the university. But after that, there are another MBA in different universities also here—in Bilbao, for example—and in the public universities. And it&#8217;s possible to do the MBA in management, cooperative management.
AMY GOODMAN : Your wife teaches in Mondragon. She teaches kids. Does she teach a Mondragon philosophy of cooperatives? Do the kids learn about what it means to live in a cooperative way in school?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK, we don&#8217;t have any subjects specific with—that the name is &quot;cooperative education,&quot; no. Only in the university, in the last year of the engineering school, but only in the engineering school, we have this subject that is cooperative education. But in the other [inaudible] schools, in the other faculties and also in the primary school and secondary school, we don&#8217;t have any subject that the name is &quot;cooperative education.&quot; But we try to teach them and to educate them in cooperative values, cooperative values that are transpersonal values, not only the knowledge, but also we try to, for example, working together and giving them more and more autonomy, or giving them more and more participation possibility, because, for example, in the university, the students are members of the university. Not only the workers or not only the teachers and the staff are members; also the students—the students are the members, and after that, the companies, cooperatives. But also, conventional companies, they are not allowed, but all of them, they can be part of the university. And in this case, students are participating in the cooperatives. And after that, all the works they have to do, they work in groups. And so, the cooperative values, we try to implement, to integrate in each students working every day.
AMY GOODMAN : How do you deal with having to manufacture products outside of the cooperative? You have factories in other countries. Where are they?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Yes, we have at this moment 77 factories overseas, all over the world. But mostly—most of them are in France and in Europe. But we have also in the States, in Brazil, Mexico, China, India. But—
AMY GOODMAN : Where in the United States?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : We&#8217;re in Arkansas, for example.
AMY GOODMAN : Arkansas.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Little Rock, yes. And—but these companies, these factories, are not cooperatives yet. So, most of them, most of the workers that are abroad, are not members; they are employees. We have a plan, and we started before, two years before the economic crisis. We started with the pilot projects—one of these in Poland, another one in Mexico, and another one in Brazil—speaking with the trade unions, speaking with the workers, white-collar worker, blue-collar workers, and also with the administration, in order to give them the possibility to participate in property, so being ownership, in management and in results. But because the economic crisis, because this is a process, it&#8217;s a long process, and that it takes at least five years, and after two years, in 2008, start the economic crisis, and overseas, we have stopped. We have already started becoming cooperatives in Spain, in the Basque Country and in Spain, but not yet in the other parts of the world.
AMY GOODMAN : And where do you unions fit in? I mean, when you started during Franco&#8217;s time, unions were forbidden, and maybe Mondragon cooperative was an answer to that. But now, working with unions in this country and around the world?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK, well, we have—also here, we have good relation with the trade union. As you know, here in a cooperative, trade union don&#8217;t work, because it&#8217;s the general assembly of all the workers who makes the decision, the most important decision. And, for example, how much we are going to increase the salary or how much we are going to decrease the salary, it&#8217;s the general assembly who makes this kind of decision. But overseas, we speak with the trade union, because we have to—we have to be together and to work together in order to give them the possibility to understand what does it mean to work for cooperatives. And in this case, trade unions are important, and—but the most important, in order to convince all the trade union, all the workers, is a very important value that the name is transparency. Transparency is very important here, but also overseas and in a conventional factory. If we are transparent, giving to all the workers and to the trade union the possibility to know everything about the company, and making every month meetings to explain how is going the company and what is the strategy and what is the—how we see the future and then so on, that is the best way to integrate and to motivate everybody and also to understand from the union, trade union.
AMY GOODMAN : Mondragon International, one of the world&#8217;s largest worker cooperatives, starting to work with the United Steelworkers a few years ago, you announced an agreement with Mondragon to develop unionized worker cooperatives in the manufacturing sector in the U.S. How has that gone?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK, well, we have an agreement with them in order to work together or to help them to build or to create cooperatives or to become some worker-owned companies and cooperatives. We are working. We have a very good relation. Maybe it&#8217;s not easy to make steps quickly, because this kind of process, I told you before that it takes at least five years, because we have to change the culture, and it&#8217;s not easy to convince everybody. But we think that that is going well, slowly. But we think that it will be profitable for them, for us and for the world.
AMY GOODMAN : The United States, in the corporate media, capitalism is equated with democracy, so you question capitalism, you&#8217;re questioning democracy. Yet you provide an alternative to capitalism, the Mondragon cooperatives, where people live very well, and they—and no one has lost their jobs, you say. Explain how it works. Is this an alternative?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : We—always we say that we prefer to work in our own way. We don&#8217;t want to create conflicts between us and with the others and with the capitalists and then so on. We think that in this century, in this 21st century, that everybody has a lot of knowledge. Every worker, and so, at this moment, in most of the countries, that the workers are not illiterate. So, and they have a lot of information and a lot of training. Today, the management model, also the management system, should be more participative, more democratical, because everybody wants to—everybody knows a lot, and everybody can participate, and it will be much better for them. And in this case, we think that—we don&#8217;t say that it&#8217;s another way or—no, we say that this is good for everybody. If everybody can make their own decision, it&#8217;s much better for them and for the society, because, after that, the aims is not to resolve my own problems. We have to resolve—or we have to develop the society, because our mission is to create wealth within the society. Our mission is not to earn money. Our mission is to create wealth within the society.
How? Through entrepreneurial development and job creation. That is our aim. And in this case, we think that democracy is much better for everyone, if participation possibilities is much better for everybody. And trying to be in solidarity—and being in solidarity, we can develop the community. And for that reason, we think, OK, this is maybe another way, or not, but this is—we think that it&#8217;s a very human way, a better human way than another one. And we think that it&#8217;s possible to compete with everyone, being a cooperative and being ownership. And we think that in the future, in this 21st century, all the things, all the ways, all the affairs, also the business, should came to this idea of giving the participation possibility to everyone, and not to only one people or 10 people making the decision, and the others has to continue, has to work behind this decision.
AMY GOODMAN : The 99 percent?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : Ninety—yeah, or more. Why not? Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : The wage differential between the highest paid in Mondragon and the lowest-paid workers, Mikel?
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : In most of the cooperatives, the biggest differences between the top and the low is one to 4.5 times, 4.5 times. But the biggest, the CEO of Mondragon, is earning six times the minimum minimum salary.
AMY GOODMAN : Mikel Lezamiz, thank you so much for joining us.
MIKEL LEZAMIZ : OK.
AMY GOODMAN : Mikel Lezamiz is the director of Mondragon Cooperative Dissemination. We&#8217;re speaking here in Busturia, Spain, in the Basque region, not far from Mondragon, where he works and lives. More than 100,000 people work in the Mondragon cooperatives. This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . nonadulttv-gDemocracy Now!NewsSequestration: What Do the Automatic Spending Cuts Mean for the Poor, Unemployed and Children?http://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/21/sequestration_what_do_the_automatic_spending
tag:democracynow.org,2013-02-21:en/story/7dcc12 JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to the showdown on Capitol Hill over the $85 billion budget cuts scheduled to take effect on March 1st. The White House and independent analysts fear the so-called &quot;sequester&quot; could jeopardize hundreds of thousands of jobs.
On Tuesday, President Obama held a public event with a group of firefighters and police officers to pressure Republicans to negotiate an agreement to divert the cuts. Obama wants Republicans to end tax breaks, mostly for the wealthy, but it&#8217;s uncertain Republicans will concede. Obama warned the cuts threaten to wreak major economic damage.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : These cuts are not smart. They are not fair. They will hurt our economy. They will add hundreds of thousands of Americans to the unemployment rolls. So, now Republicans in Congress face a simple choice: Are they willing to compromise to protect vital investments in education and healthcare and national security, and all the jobs that depend on them, or would they rather put hundreds of thousands of jobs and our entire economy at risk just to protect a few special-interest tax loopholes that benefit only the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations? That&#8217;s the choice.
AMY GOODMAN : On Tuesday, the economic group Macroeconomic Advisers predicted the sequester will slow economic growth by more than half a percentage point and result in the loss of 700,000 jobs. And a new article by ColorLines notes the damage will stretch far beyond jobs. The article is called &quot;What&#8217;s &#39;Sequestration&#39; Mean in Real Life?&quot; and it details how the spending cuts will force a dramatic pullback in critical areas like health, education, housing and food security, especially in already vulnerable and marginalized communities.
For more, we&#8217;re joined by the author of the piece, Imara Jones. He is the economic justice contributor for ColorLines.com. He served in the Clinton White House, where he worked on international trade policy.
Imara Jones, welcome to Democracy Now! First explain, for people who don&#8217;t understand this word, which is coming into the vocabulary with this meaning just recently—what does &quot;sequestration&quot; mean?
IMARA JONES : Yeah, it&#8217;s even hard to say. Thank you for having me.
Well, what it means is automatic, across-the-board cuts made in government spending. And as the president pointed out, they&#8217;re indiscriminate because they are across the board. And they are the result of compromises in Washington that couldn&#8217;t have been made in terms of finding a way to do our budget in such a way to get us to a long-term management of our debt without indiscriminate cuts. And so, that&#8217;s what sequestration is, and that&#8217;s what sequestration means.
And because of the way that the budget is set up, most of those cuts fall on areas that are called &quot;discretionary spending,&quot; because they&#8217;re not set by a formula with set revenues and set expenditures, like Social Security, Medicare and others. And those areas are the ones that target the programs that focus on economic opportunity, that help the working poor and that give average Americans a shot at making it in critical areas of, as you said, housing, food security, transportation, even unemployment insurance. And so, for communities of color and communities that have been hard hit by the recession, it&#8217;s a nuclear bomb that&#8217;s waiting to go off.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in—specifically, I think you mentioned as many as 185,000 people would lose Section 8 housing subsidy certificates. What are some of the other immediate effects of if this goes into—this happens starting March 1 or March 15th or in the next few weeks?
IMARA JONES : I mean, it reads like a laundry list, and we could take up the rest of the time going through the list. But some of the critical areas are: 125,000 people will lose Section 8 housing, which is critical housing support for the working poor; 100,000 people who are homeless will not receive the support that they need without a place to go; there won&#8217;t be 450,000 AIDS tests; something like 500,000 vaccines won&#8217;t be manufactured; a million people won&#8217;t be able to access community health centers; unemployment insurance for four million long-term unemployed will be cut by 10 percent; in terms of education, 70,000 kids won&#8217;t have access to Head Start; another 30,000 in terms of child care assistance. And then, if the sequestration goes on, because, you know, it&#8217;s a rolling—sort of a rolling storm, if it goes on through the summer and into the fall, the programs that support up to 20 million of the nation&#8217;s poorest students will be cut and are in jeopardy.
AMY GOODMAN : During an interview on Fox News on Sunday, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina suggested slashing healthcare to stop scheduled sequester cuts from, quote, &quot;destroying the military.&quot;
SEN . LINDSEY GRAHAM : The commander-in-chief thought—came up with the idea of sequestration, destroying the military and putting a lot of good programs at risk. Here&#8217;s my belief: Let&#8217;s take &quot;Obamacare&quot; and put it on the table. You can make $86,000 a year in income and still get a government subsidy under &quot;Obamacare.&quot; &quot;Obamacare&quot; is destroying healthcare in this country. People are leaving the private sector because their companies can&#8217;t afford to offer &quot;Obamacare.&quot; If you want to look at ways to find $1.2 trillion in savings over the next decade, let&#8217;s look at &quot;Obamacare.&quot; Let&#8217;s don&#8217;t destroy the military and just cut blindly across the board.
AMY GOODMAN : That&#8217;s Republican Senator Lindsey Graham on Fox. Your response?
IMARA JONES : Well, the premise is wrong, and this is one of the key problems with the approach in Washington. What the United States needs to do is figure out not how to cut, but how to spend. The only way that we are going to restore ourselves to economic health is by spending. The reality is that the United States government funds its level of activities at the same level of Mexico. The United States has the lowest level of taxation of any developed country in the world. And what that means is that we are underinvesting in infrastructure, we&#8217;re underinvesting in education, we&#8217;re underinvesting in the key things that fuel economic growth. And it&#8217;s showing up in living wages, and it&#8217;s showing up in terms of the long-term unemployed and all of the problems that knock on from that.
And so the conversation is wrong, and Lindsey Graham and his party just feed into that. And it&#8217;s worth noting that one of the ways that we got into sequestration was through an agreement between the White House and the Congress—not once, but twice. And so, the entire frame of the discussion in Washington is wrong. And the longer it goes on, the worse the American people will be, because it&#8217;s not what built this country. We funded investments. We believe in creating an economy that works for everyone. And until we spend at the level that&#8217;s necessary, that can&#8217;t happen.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And the likelihood of a deal before March 1, when—
IMARA JONES : Highly doubtful, because both sides aren&#8217;t talking. They&#8217;re all preparing for the list of cuts and positioning for the public relations disaster afterwards. And the problem is that this is one of three crises that&#8217;s coming over the next six weeks for budget. So, there&#8217;s a possible government shutdown on March 27th. And then on May 1, the borrowing authority of the United States government runs out. That can shut down parts of the government, lead to a downgrade, and possibly default, depending on how it&#8217;s managed. And so, we&#8217;re in for a rough ride here. And the longer it goes on, the more entrenched both sides will be and the likelihood that everything will come off the rails.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, Imara Jones, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Imara Jones writes for ColorLines , economic justice contributor at ColorLines.com. He served in the Clinton White House, where he worked on international trade policy. His piece , that we&#8217;ll link to at democracynow.org, &quot;What&#8217;s &#39;Sequestration&#39; Mean in Real Life?&quot; This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to the showdown on Capitol Hill over the $85 billion budget cuts scheduled to take effect on March 1st. The White House and independent analysts fear the so-called "sequester" could jeopardize hundreds of thousands of jobs.

On Tuesday, President Obama held a public event with a group of firefighters and police officers to pressure Republicans to negotiate an agreement to divert the cuts. Obama wants Republicans to end tax breaks, mostly for the wealthy, but it’s uncertain Republicans will concede. Obama warned the cuts threaten to wreak major economic damage.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: These cuts are not smart. They are not fair. They will hurt our economy. They will add hundreds of thousands of Americans to the unemployment rolls. So, now Republicans in Congress face a simple choice: Are they willing to compromise to protect vital investments in education and healthcare and national security, and all the jobs that depend on them, or would they rather put hundreds of thousands of jobs and our entire economy at risk just to protect a few special-interest tax loopholes that benefit only the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations? That’s the choice.

AMYGOODMAN: On Tuesday, the economic group Macroeconomic Advisers predicted the sequester will slow economic growth by more than half a percentage point and result in the loss of 700,000 jobs. And a new article by ColorLines notes the damage will stretch far beyond jobs. The article is called "What’s 'Sequestration' Mean in Real Life?" and it details how the spending cuts will force a dramatic pullback in critical areas like health, education, housing and food security, especially in already vulnerable and marginalized communities.

For more, we’re joined by the author of the piece, Imara Jones. He is the economic justice contributor for ColorLines.com. He served in the Clinton White House, where he worked on international trade policy.

Imara Jones, welcome to Democracy Now! First explain, for people who don’t understand this word, which is coming into the vocabulary with this meaning just recently—what does "sequestration" mean?

IMARAJONES: Yeah, it’s even hard to say. Thank you for having me.

Well, what it means is automatic, across-the-board cuts made in government spending. And as the president pointed out, they’re indiscriminate because they are across the board. And they are the result of compromises in Washington that couldn’t have been made in terms of finding a way to do our budget in such a way to get us to a long-term management of our debt without indiscriminate cuts. And so, that’s what sequestration is, and that’s what sequestration means.

And because of the way that the budget is set up, most of those cuts fall on areas that are called "discretionary spending," because they’re not set by a formula with set revenues and set expenditures, like Social Security, Medicare and others. And those areas are the ones that target the programs that focus on economic opportunity, that help the working poor and that give average Americans a shot at making it in critical areas of, as you said, housing, food security, transportation, even unemployment insurance. And so, for communities of color and communities that have been hard hit by the recession, it’s a nuclear bomb that’s waiting to go off.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in—specifically, I think you mentioned as many as 185,000 people would lose Section 8 housing subsidy certificates. What are some of the other immediate effects of if this goes into—this happens starting March 1 or March 15th or in the next few weeks?

IMARAJONES: I mean, it reads like a laundry list, and we could take up the rest of the time going through the list. But some of the critical areas are: 125,000 people will lose Section 8 housing, which is critical housing support for the working poor; 100,000 people who are homeless will not receive the support that they need without a place to go; there won’t be 450,000 AIDS tests; something like 500,000 vaccines won’t be manufactured; a million people won’t be able to access community health centers; unemployment insurance for four million long-term unemployed will be cut by 10 percent; in terms of education, 70,000 kids won’t have access to Head Start; another 30,000 in terms of child care assistance. And then, if the sequestration goes on, because, you know, it’s a rolling—sort of a rolling storm, if it goes on through the summer and into the fall, the programs that support up to 20 million of the nation’s poorest students will be cut and are in jeopardy.

SEN. LINDSEYGRAHAM: The commander-in-chief thought—came up with the idea of sequestration, destroying the military and putting a lot of good programs at risk. Here’s my belief: Let’s take "Obamacare" and put it on the table. You can make $86,000 a year in income and still get a government subsidy under "Obamacare." "Obamacare" is destroying healthcare in this country. People are leaving the private sector because their companies can’t afford to offer "Obamacare." If you want to look at ways to find $1.2 trillion in savings over the next decade, let’s look at "Obamacare." Let’s don’t destroy the military and just cut blindly across the board.

IMARAJONES: Well, the premise is wrong, and this is one of the key problems with the approach in Washington. What the United States needs to do is figure out not how to cut, but how to spend. The only way that we are going to restore ourselves to economic health is by spending. The reality is that the United States government funds its level of activities at the same level of Mexico. The United States has the lowest level of taxation of any developed country in the world. And what that means is that we are underinvesting in infrastructure, we’re underinvesting in education, we’re underinvesting in the key things that fuel economic growth. And it’s showing up in living wages, and it’s showing up in terms of the long-term unemployed and all of the problems that knock on from that.

And so the conversation is wrong, and Lindsey Graham and his party just feed into that. And it’s worth noting that one of the ways that we got into sequestration was through an agreement between the White House and the Congress—not once, but twice. And so, the entire frame of the discussion in Washington is wrong. And the longer it goes on, the worse the American people will be, because it’s not what built this country. We funded investments. We believe in creating an economy that works for everyone. And until we spend at the level that’s necessary, that can’t happen.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And the likelihood of a deal before March 1, when—

IMARAJONES: Highly doubtful, because both sides aren’t talking. They’re all preparing for the list of cuts and positioning for the public relations disaster afterwards. And the problem is that this is one of three crises that’s coming over the next six weeks for budget. So, there’s a possible government shutdown on March 27th. And then on May 1, the borrowing authority of the United States government runs out. That can shut down parts of the government, lead to a downgrade, and possibly default, depending on how it’s managed. And so, we’re in for a rough ride here. And the longer it goes on, the more entrenched both sides will be and the likelihood that everything will come off the rails.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, Imara Jones, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Imara Jones writes for ColorLines , economic justice contributor at ColorLines.com. He served in the Clinton White House, where he worked on international trade policy. His piece, that we’ll link to at democracynow.org, "What’s 'Sequestration' Mean in Real Life?" This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.

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Thu, 21 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500Housework as Work: Selma James on Unwaged Labor and Decades-Long Struggle to Pay Housewiveshttp://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/16/housework_as_work_selma_james_on
tag:democracynow.org,2012-04-16:en/story/ddb463 AMY GOODMAN : Does housework count as, well, &quot;real&quot; work? Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen has ignited a firestorm with her comments that Ann Romney, wife of Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney, has, quote, &quot;actually never worked a day in her life.&quot; Rosen, a CNN political contributor and working mother, made her comments on CNN&#8217;s Anderson Cooper show on Wednesday.
HILARY ROSEN : What you have is Mitt Romney running around the country, saying, &quot;Well, you know, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues, and when I listen to my wife, that&#8217;s what I&#8217;m hearing.&quot; Guess what. His wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She&#8217;s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school, and how do we worry—why do we worry about their future. So I think it&#8217;s—yes, it&#8217;s about these positions, and, yes, I think there will be a war of words about the positions. But there&#8217;s something much more fundamental about Mitt Romney. He just—he seems so old-fashioned when it comes to women.
AMY GOODMAN : That was Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen. Well, Ann Romney put out her first tweet in response. She said, &quot;I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work.&quot; Romney then went on Fox News with Martha MacCallum on Thursday.
ANN ROMNEY : My career choice was to be a mother. And I think all of us need to know that we need to respect choices that women make. Other women make other choices, to have a career and raise family, which I think Hilary Rosen has actually done herself. I respect that. That&#8217;s wonderful. But, you know, there are other people that have a choice. We have to respect women in all those choices that they make.
AMY GOODMAN : The Romneys&#8217; son, Josh, tweeted, quote, &quot;@AnnDRomney is one of the smartest, hardest working woman I know. Could have done anything with her life, chose to raise me.&quot; Well, President Obama also weighed in on the controversy, saying there is &quot;no tougher job than being a mom.&quot;
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : Here&#8217;s what I know: that there is no tougher job than being a mom. And, you know, when I think about what Michelle&#8217;s had to do, when I think about my own mom, a single mother raising me and my sister, that&#8217;s work. So, anybody who would argue otherwise, I think, probably needs to rethink their statement.
AMY GOODMAN : Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen tried to address the firestorm over her comments on CNN&#8217;s Newsroom , saying they were never meant as an attack.
HILARY ROSEN : This is not about Ann Romney. This is about the waitress in a diner in, you know, someplace in Nevada who has two kids whose day care funding is being cut off because of the Romney-Ryan budget, and she doesn&#8217;t know what to do. This isn&#8217;t about whether Ann Romney or I or other women of, you know, some means can afford to make a choice to stay home and raise kids. Most women in America, let&#8217;s face it, don&#8217;t have that choice.
AMY GOODMAN : Today we bring in a new voice, which is actually an historic voice, into the discussion: the longtime activist, writer, political thinker, Selma James, known for her pioneering work on women&#8217;s rights and against racism. She&#8217;s credited with coining the phrase &quot;unwaged&quot; labor to describe the work of housewives, and she has argued women should be paid for housework. Selma James&#8217; new book is called Sex, Race and Class—The Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings 1952-2011 . In a series of arguments that have remained remarkably consistent across six decades, Selma James urges unity across the lines of race, class and gender.
I interviewed Selma James recently here in New York. She had just flown in from London, where she lives. She talked about the great West Indian scholar C.L.R. James, who was her husband, and the writing of her seminal 1952 essay, &quot;A Woman&#8217;s Place.&quot; She referred to C.L.R. James by the nickname &quot;Nello.&quot;
SELMA JAMES : I was not interested in writing, per se . Everything that&#8217;s in this new book that you mentioned is written for a purpose, as part of a movement. I wrote A Woman&#8217;s Place because Nello had urged me to do it. And he called me one day and said, &quot;Have you written, you know, your pamphlet?&quot; And he said—I said, &quot;No.&quot; And he said, &quot;Why not?&quot; And I said, &quot;Because I don&#8217;t know how to write a pamphlet.&quot; And he said, &quot;Well, you—it&#8217;s very simple.&quot; He said, &quot;You take a shoebox, and you make a slit at the top. And every time you think of something, you put it on a piece of paper, and you put the piece of paper in the shoebox. Then, one day, you open the shoebox up, and you put the sentences in order,&quot; he said, &quot;and you will have your pamphlet.&quot; I said, &quot;OK.&quot; And so, I took a day off work. I was working in a factory wiring and soldering, and I left at the same time I would have left the home if I had gone to work. I put my son in child care at the same time as usual. But I went to a friend&#8217;s house instead, because if I had stayed at home, I would have cleaned the cook. I know I would have. And I put the sentences together. And by the evening, I had the draft of a pamphlet. He had been absolutely right. It was great advice that he&#8217;d given me.
I look back now, and I know that one of the ways he found that out was because Nello had helped organize with sharecroppers in southeast Missouri, and he had told me that the men had said—and Booker was the leading person—had said that they needed a pamphlet. And Nello had said, &quot;All right, Booker.&quot; And he sat down at the table with a pen, and he said, &quot;OK, what do you want to say?&quot; And the man was not expecting that; he was expecting Nello to write a pamphlet for him. So he knew how to deal with grassroots people. He knew how to be useful to them. And he was a very creative person in that regard, as well. So by the time he got to this young woman who was a housewife and factory worker, he knew the advice to give me. And that&#8217;s how the pamphlet was written.
AMY GOODMAN : And talk about your main thesis in A Woman&#8217;s Place .
SELMA JAMES : Well, you know, I didn&#8217;t have a thesis, per se . But reading it, what, now—and a lot of women have liked it, and it&#8217;s the only thing I wrote that my mother liked. My mother said, &quot;Yes, this is good. Now you&#8217;re on the right track.&quot; It was that women are engaged in the work of making society, of making children—that is an enormous job—and that the separation between women and men is harmful to all of us.
After I wrote A Woman&#8217;s Place — you know, I remembered a lot of things, writing this or getting this anthology together. I remember walking into a neighbor&#8217;s house, and all her children&#8217;s clothes were lined up, were hanging from a line that she had put in her living room. And I said—I thought she&#8217;d gone mad. And I said, you know, &quot;What is this about?&quot; She said, &quot;I&#8217;m selling them.&quot; I said, &quot;Why?&quot; She said, &quot;If I don&#8217;t get any money of my own, I&#8217;m going to go crazy, so I&#8217;m selling all the clothes that the children have grown out of.&quot; And that stayed with me, you know, always. And I understood, you know, that we needed money of our own without having to go out to work and do the double day and all the rest. And that was an important part of what was in my mind when I wrote A Woman&#8217;s Place , and it&#8217;s still very important in my mind.
AMY GOODMAN : And then talk about the organizing you did and coining this phrase, &quot;unwaged work.&quot;
SELMA JAMES : Well, when the new women&#8217;s movement burst out in the early 1970s in England, I thought, oh, well, they will be way ahead of where I was, and I must go to learn, and all the rest. And they were, in many respects, but they still had not grappled with the housework. They still had not grappled with that lack of financial independence and how crucial that was. They still—and they had a very peculiar notion of what this work is. They said women will go out to work, as if it was some liberation to go out to work. They clearly—the work that they were thinking of doing was not the work that I had done of wiring and soldering and, in the machine shop, getting very dirty trying to make holes in metal. You know, they had never done or didn&#8217;t know about the kind of work that most women did who went out to work, who were working-class women. And so, I had to find out a number of things. I had to find out how to tell them about the lives of most women, which they didn&#8217;t seem to know about. And I also had to work out what was the role of women in relation to capitalism. What were we doing, you know, that made our work so essential? And I had just been reading Capital in a study group, because I just wanted to find out what the guy said—
AMY GOODMAN : Karl Marx&#8217;s Das Kapital .
SELMA JAMES : —by myself. Karl Marx. And he had said that we sell our labor power to capitalism. And I said, &quot;Labor power? But women make labor power, and why haven&#8217;t they told me this?&quot; Because I thought all the Marxists knew this and had neglected to mention it to me. That was my first thought. And then I realized that they had never understood that women produce the whole labor force and that that work is not acknowledged and not even considered as work. It&#8217;s like, &quot;What did you do all day?&quot; was a very popular way that men would greet women when they came home from &quot;real&quot; work.
And so, we then, you know, talked about the unwaged work that women were doing. That is, you got some payment, you got your food and board, if you were a housewife, but you didn&#8217;t have the autonomy of money, which ensured that everybody knew you were working and which gave you the independence of having money of your own. But that was really only the beginning, because then we began to understand that most of the world had no wages, that we—that the subsistence farming in Africa—you know, 80 percent of the food that is eaten in Africa is grown by women, unwaged—you know, no money, nothing, just very, very hard work—and that all of this work, the volunteer work, you know, the reproduction of the human race, really, that women do, not merely, you know, in giving birth, which is quite important, not merely in giving children the food that they want and that they need, which is breast milk, but just caring for everyone and fighting for everyone. You know, it&#8217;s women who fight to get justice for their children and for men. You know, we have a slogan in London: &quot;Mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, fighting for our loved ones&#8217; lives.&quot; And that&#8217;s not a Romantic view of women&#8217;s work that—women&#8217;s justice work. That is the reality. That&#8217;s who does it. That&#8217;s who&#8217;s on the line in front of the prison where men and women are held unjustly. It&#8217;s women who are doing this work. And it&#8217;s an extension of the caring work that we have always done.
Now, I want to make it absolutely clear: we do this work, and we are civilized by this work, we women, and have a much greater understanding of human beings, because that&#8217;s what we&#8217;re dealing with all the time. But we don&#8217;t want to be the only ones to do it. Men need to do this work, because men need to be civilized by this work as we have been. Men don&#8217;t—we don&#8217;t want them to be doing this work for capitalism and not doing this work for ourselves, for each other, you know, for the society generally. Men have to start making society, along with women, not to help—I&#8217;m not talking about men helping. Sometimes we have to fight so that they give us a little help, but I&#8217;m not talking about that. I&#8217;m talking about that being the aim and purpose of our lives, to be with others, to care for others, and to, as I say, to make society with us.
AMY GOODMAN : You wrote the original piece, &quot;Sex, Race and Class,&quot; which is the title of the book of essays that you&#8217;ve put out now.
SELMA JAMES : It really came from the United States. I wrote it in England, but I went on a lecture tour in 1973, and I heard all the opposition to wages for housework, how it was going to institutionalize us in the home. I was thinking, wouldn&#8217;t that be nice to institutionalize—I have all these records that I want to listen to and all the rest, and I can be at home and not have to go out to work. But aside from that, it was just an education. I began to understand what wages for housework was and how it was a political perspective, how you began with unwaged, rather than waged, workers. And you got to the waged workers, but when you began with the waged workers, you never got to the unwaged workers. And so, I was smarter by the time I got back. And somebody—we had written a book. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and I had written a book called The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community , and there was a brilliant review of it. That is, it was very favorable. But he had said that women knew what the black movement didn&#8217;t know. And I had to answer it. So I wrote a letter, but the letter kept getting longer and longer and longer, and pretty soon it was the pamphlet, Sex, Race and Class .
AMY GOODMAN : The shoebox got very full.
SELMA JAMES : You could say that. The point was that by that time, there were—there was a real problem with how do you balance the movement of black people, the movement of immigrants, the movement of women, the movement of lesbian and gay people. How do they relate to each other? And there was a kind of competition for priorities. And I wrote the pamphlet to say, &quot;Look, we are all in the same struggle, and there is a connection between all of us that we must draw out. But in order for that connection to be made, each sector will make its own autonomous case, and on that basis we can unite.&quot; How exactly? I don&#8217;t know, because I wasn&#8217;t the left in that way. I didn&#8217;t feel I had to have the answers, only the questions. And that&#8217;s what &quot;Sex, Race and Class&quot; is about, really. And it said that, for example, black women, or women of color generally, they&#8217;re the women&#8217;s movement, and they&#8217;re the black movement. And so, what&#8217;s wrong? I mean, there are—you know, people are many things, and that we are all in that hierarchy, because there&#8217;s an international division of labor of which we are all part, including those of us who are unwaged.
AMY GOODMAN : Selma James, you wrote recently about SlutWalk.
SELMA JAMES : Yes.
AMY GOODMAN : Slut is a big conversation in the United States now, because Rush Limbaugh, one of the right-wing radio talk show hosts, who plays such a major role in the Republican Party, called a young law student who was calling for health insurance coverage of contraceptives, he called her a &quot;slut&quot; and a &quot;whore,&quot; a &quot;prostitute&quot; who should have sex videos. She should have to put—post sex videos of herself online. And it has caused many, even of his past supporters, to stop supporting him for saying this. Why do you talk about SlutWalk?
SELMA JAMES : Well, you know—you know the long—you know &quot;Death, where is thy sting?&quot; You know, what the SlutWalk women did was to make it impossible to use those words in a way that is hurtful and insulting. I was astonished by the march. I went on the SlutWalk march. First of all, it was started by a 16-year-old who had had enough of women being raped and the police not paying attention, and who had refused, like women everywhere, to accept that if we dress a particular way or if we speak a particular way or if we do a particular thing, we can be accused. She said, &quot;Accuse us as you like. We accept it all, and we then refuse everything that you accuse us of.&quot; So, they were very anti-racist. They were very pro-prostitute. They were very anti-rape. They were very diverse. And they were the new women&#8217;s movement. They were very young.
And I didn&#8217;t feel, walking with them, that I was surrounded by women who were ambitious. I think that&#8217;s really crucial in the women&#8217;s movement today, because a lot of feminism has gone into individual careers and into ambition, and there&#8217;s some evidence that the class line between women is much greater now with feminism, because a whole set of women have gone into the part of the elite. They get pay equity. They get a lot of kudos, a lot of—they are very accepted in the society. And the rest of us are getting screwed. I mean, our pay is not going up. The child care doesn&#8217;t exist or is very bad. Welfare has been abolished. And we really need to have another reason to be together, which is the real conditions of our lives, rather than an individual ambition. And I felt that the SlutWalk was part of that new movement, which says it&#8217;s not ambition we want. We want to have the freedom to live the lives as we like them, and we are together for that.
AMY GOODMAN : Selma James, activist, political thinker, writer, the founder of International Wages for Housework Campaign, she helped launch the Global Women&#8217;s Strike. She is the author of numerous publications, including, most recently, Sex, Race and Class—The Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings 1952-2011 . She was married for years to the West Indian political philosopher, activist and writer, C.L.R. James. And that does it for our show. For the full interview with Selma James, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. AMYGOODMAN: Does housework count as, well, "real" work? Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen has ignited a firestorm with her comments that Ann Romney, wife of Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney, has, quote, "actually never worked a day in her life." Rosen, a CNN political contributor and working mother, made her comments on CNN’s Anderson Cooper show on Wednesday.

HILARYROSEN: What you have is Mitt Romney running around the country, saying, "Well, you know, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues, and when I listen to my wife, that’s what I’m hearing." Guess what. His wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She’s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school, and how do we worry—why do we worry about their future. So I think it’s—yes, it’s about these positions, and, yes, I think there will be a war of words about the positions. But there’s something much more fundamental about Mitt Romney. He just—he seems so old-fashioned when it comes to women.

AMYGOODMAN: That was Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen. Well, Ann Romney put out her first tweet in response. She said, "I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work." Romney then went on Fox News with Martha MacCallum on Thursday.

ANNROMNEY: My career choice was to be a mother. And I think all of us need to know that we need to respect choices that women make. Other women make other choices, to have a career and raise family, which I think Hilary Rosen has actually done herself. I respect that. That’s wonderful. But, you know, there are other people that have a choice. We have to respect women in all those choices that they make.

AMYGOODMAN: The Romneys’ son, Josh, tweeted, quote, "@AnnDRomney is one of the smartest, hardest working woman I know. Could have done anything with her life, chose to raise me." Well, President Obama also weighed in on the controversy, saying there is "no tougher job than being a mom."

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: Here’s what I know: that there is no tougher job than being a mom. And, you know, when I think about what Michelle’s had to do, when I think about my own mom, a single mother raising me and my sister, that’s work. So, anybody who would argue otherwise, I think, probably needs to rethink their statement.

AMYGOODMAN: Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen tried to address the firestorm over her comments on CNN’s Newsroom, saying they were never meant as an attack.

HILARYROSEN: This is not about Ann Romney. This is about the waitress in a diner in, you know, someplace in Nevada who has two kids whose day care funding is being cut off because of the Romney-Ryan budget, and she doesn’t know what to do. This isn’t about whether Ann Romney or I or other women of, you know, some means can afford to make a choice to stay home and raise kids. Most women in America, let’s face it, don’t have that choice.

AMYGOODMAN: Today we bring in a new voice, which is actually an historic voice, into the discussion: the longtime activist, writer, political thinker, Selma James, known for her pioneering work on women’s rights and against racism. She’s credited with coining the phrase "unwaged" labor to describe the work of housewives, and she has argued women should be paid for housework. Selma James’ new book is called Sex, Race and Class—The Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings 1952-2011. In a series of arguments that have remained remarkably consistent across six decades, Selma James urges unity across the lines of race, class and gender.

I interviewed Selma James recently here in New York. She had just flown in from London, where she lives. She talked about the great West Indian scholar C.L.R. James, who was her husband, and the writing of her seminal 1952 essay, "A Woman’s Place." She referred to C.L.R. James by the nickname "Nello."

SELMAJAMES: I was not interested in writing, per se. Everything that’s in this new book that you mentioned is written for a purpose, as part of a movement. I wrote A Woman’s Place because Nello had urged me to do it. And he called me one day and said, "Have you written, you know, your pamphlet?" And he said—I said, "No." And he said, "Why not?" And I said, "Because I don’t know how to write a pamphlet." And he said, "Well, you—it’s very simple." He said, "You take a shoebox, and you make a slit at the top. And every time you think of something, you put it on a piece of paper, and you put the piece of paper in the shoebox. Then, one day, you open the shoebox up, and you put the sentences in order," he said, "and you will have your pamphlet." I said, "OK." And so, I took a day off work. I was working in a factory wiring and soldering, and I left at the same time I would have left the home if I had gone to work. I put my son in child care at the same time as usual. But I went to a friend’s house instead, because if I had stayed at home, I would have cleaned the cook. I know I would have. And I put the sentences together. And by the evening, I had the draft of a pamphlet. He had been absolutely right. It was great advice that he’d given me.

I look back now, and I know that one of the ways he found that out was because Nello had helped organize with sharecroppers in southeast Missouri, and he had told me that the men had said—and Booker was the leading person—had said that they needed a pamphlet. And Nello had said, "All right, Booker." And he sat down at the table with a pen, and he said, "OK, what do you want to say?" And the man was not expecting that; he was expecting Nello to write a pamphlet for him. So he knew how to deal with grassroots people. He knew how to be useful to them. And he was a very creative person in that regard, as well. So by the time he got to this young woman who was a housewife and factory worker, he knew the advice to give me. And that’s how the pamphlet was written.

AMYGOODMAN: And talk about your main thesis in A Woman’s Place.

SELMAJAMES: Well, you know, I didn’t have a thesis, per se. But reading it, what, now—and a lot of women have liked it, and it’s the only thing I wrote that my mother liked. My mother said, "Yes, this is good. Now you’re on the right track." It was that women are engaged in the work of making society, of making children—that is an enormous job—and that the separation between women and men is harmful to all of us.

After I wrote A Woman’s Place — you know, I remembered a lot of things, writing this or getting this anthology together. I remember walking into a neighbor’s house, and all her children’s clothes were lined up, were hanging from a line that she had put in her living room. And I said—I thought she’d gone mad. And I said, you know, "What is this about?" She said, "I’m selling them." I said, "Why?" She said, "If I don’t get any money of my own, I’m going to go crazy, so I’m selling all the clothes that the children have grown out of." And that stayed with me, you know, always. And I understood, you know, that we needed money of our own without having to go out to work and do the double day and all the rest. And that was an important part of what was in my mind when I wrote A Woman’s Place, and it’s still very important in my mind.

AMYGOODMAN: And then talk about the organizing you did and coining this phrase, "unwaged work."

SELMAJAMES: Well, when the new women’s movement burst out in the early 1970s in England, I thought, oh, well, they will be way ahead of where I was, and I must go to learn, and all the rest. And they were, in many respects, but they still had not grappled with the housework. They still had not grappled with that lack of financial independence and how crucial that was. They still—and they had a very peculiar notion of what this work is. They said women will go out to work, as if it was some liberation to go out to work. They clearly—the work that they were thinking of doing was not the work that I had done of wiring and soldering and, in the machine shop, getting very dirty trying to make holes in metal. You know, they had never done or didn’t know about the kind of work that most women did who went out to work, who were working-class women. And so, I had to find out a number of things. I had to find out how to tell them about the lives of most women, which they didn’t seem to know about. And I also had to work out what was the role of women in relation to capitalism. What were we doing, you know, that made our work so essential? And I had just been reading Capital in a study group, because I just wanted to find out what the guy said—

AMYGOODMAN: Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.

SELMAJAMES: —by myself. Karl Marx. And he had said that we sell our labor power to capitalism. And I said, "Labor power? But women make labor power, and why haven’t they told me this?" Because I thought all the Marxists knew this and had neglected to mention it to me. That was my first thought. And then I realized that they had never understood that women produce the whole labor force and that that work is not acknowledged and not even considered as work. It’s like, "What did you do all day?" was a very popular way that men would greet women when they came home from "real" work.

And so, we then, you know, talked about the unwaged work that women were doing. That is, you got some payment, you got your food and board, if you were a housewife, but you didn’t have the autonomy of money, which ensured that everybody knew you were working and which gave you the independence of having money of your own. But that was really only the beginning, because then we began to understand that most of the world had no wages, that we—that the subsistence farming in Africa—you know, 80 percent of the food that is eaten in Africa is grown by women, unwaged—you know, no money, nothing, just very, very hard work—and that all of this work, the volunteer work, you know, the reproduction of the human race, really, that women do, not merely, you know, in giving birth, which is quite important, not merely in giving children the food that they want and that they need, which is breast milk, but just caring for everyone and fighting for everyone. You know, it’s women who fight to get justice for their children and for men. You know, we have a slogan in London: "Mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, fighting for our loved ones’ lives." And that’s not a Romantic view of women’s work that—women’s justice work. That is the reality. That’s who does it. That’s who’s on the line in front of the prison where men and women are held unjustly. It’s women who are doing this work. And it’s an extension of the caring work that we have always done.

Now, I want to make it absolutely clear: we do this work, and we are civilized by this work, we women, and have a much greater understanding of human beings, because that’s what we’re dealing with all the time. But we don’t want to be the only ones to do it. Men need to do this work, because men need to be civilized by this work as we have been. Men don’t—we don’t want them to be doing this work for capitalism and not doing this work for ourselves, for each other, you know, for the society generally. Men have to start making society, along with women, not to help—I’m not talking about men helping. Sometimes we have to fight so that they give us a little help, but I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about that being the aim and purpose of our lives, to be with others, to care for others, and to, as I say, to make society with us.

AMYGOODMAN: You wrote the original piece, "Sex, Race and Class," which is the title of the book of essays that you’ve put out now.

SELMAJAMES: It really came from the United States. I wrote it in England, but I went on a lecture tour in 1973, and I heard all the opposition to wages for housework, how it was going to institutionalize us in the home. I was thinking, wouldn’t that be nice to institutionalize—I have all these records that I want to listen to and all the rest, and I can be at home and not have to go out to work. But aside from that, it was just an education. I began to understand what wages for housework was and how it was a political perspective, how you began with unwaged, rather than waged, workers. And you got to the waged workers, but when you began with the waged workers, you never got to the unwaged workers. And so, I was smarter by the time I got back. And somebody—we had written a book. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and I had written a book called The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, and there was a brilliant review of it. That is, it was very favorable. But he had said that women knew what the black movement didn’t know. And I had to answer it. So I wrote a letter, but the letter kept getting longer and longer and longer, and pretty soon it was the pamphlet, Sex, Race and Class.

AMYGOODMAN: The shoebox got very full.

SELMAJAMES: You could say that. The point was that by that time, there were—there was a real problem with how do you balance the movement of black people, the movement of immigrants, the movement of women, the movement of lesbian and gay people. How do they relate to each other? And there was a kind of competition for priorities. And I wrote the pamphlet to say, "Look, we are all in the same struggle, and there is a connection between all of us that we must draw out. But in order for that connection to be made, each sector will make its own autonomous case, and on that basis we can unite." How exactly? I don’t know, because I wasn’t the left in that way. I didn’t feel I had to have the answers, only the questions. And that’s what "Sex, Race and Class" is about, really. And it said that, for example, black women, or women of color generally, they’re the women’s movement, and they’re the black movement. And so, what’s wrong? I mean, there are—you know, people are many things, and that we are all in that hierarchy, because there’s an international division of labor of which we are all part, including those of us who are unwaged.

AMYGOODMAN: Selma James, you wrote recently about SlutWalk.

SELMAJAMES: Yes.

AMYGOODMAN: Slut is a big conversation in the United States now, because Rush Limbaugh, one of the right-wing radio talk show hosts, who plays such a major role in the Republican Party, called a young law student who was calling for health insurance coverage of contraceptives, he called her a "slut" and a "whore," a "prostitute" who should have sex videos. She should have to put—post sex videos of herself online. And it has caused many, even of his past supporters, to stop supporting him for saying this. Why do you talk about SlutWalk?

SELMAJAMES: Well, you know—you know the long—you know "Death, where is thy sting?" You know, what the SlutWalk women did was to make it impossible to use those words in a way that is hurtful and insulting. I was astonished by the march. I went on the SlutWalk march. First of all, it was started by a 16-year-old who had had enough of women being raped and the police not paying attention, and who had refused, like women everywhere, to accept that if we dress a particular way or if we speak a particular way or if we do a particular thing, we can be accused. She said, "Accuse us as you like. We accept it all, and we then refuse everything that you accuse us of." So, they were very anti-racist. They were very pro-prostitute. They were very anti-rape. They were very diverse. And they were the new women’s movement. They were very young.

And I didn’t feel, walking with them, that I was surrounded by women who were ambitious. I think that’s really crucial in the women’s movement today, because a lot of feminism has gone into individual careers and into ambition, and there’s some evidence that the class line between women is much greater now with feminism, because a whole set of women have gone into the part of the elite. They get pay equity. They get a lot of kudos, a lot of—they are very accepted in the society. And the rest of us are getting screwed. I mean, our pay is not going up. The child care doesn’t exist or is very bad. Welfare has been abolished. And we really need to have another reason to be together, which is the real conditions of our lives, rather than an individual ambition. And I felt that the SlutWalk was part of that new movement, which says it’s not ambition we want. We want to have the freedom to live the lives as we like them, and we are together for that.

AMYGOODMAN: Selma James, activist, political thinker, writer, the founder of International Wages for Housework Campaign, she helped launch the Global Women’s Strike. She is the author of numerous publications, including, most recently, Sex, Race and Class—The Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings 1952-2011. She was married for years to the West Indian political philosopher, activist and writer, C.L.R. James. And that does it for our show. For the full interview with Selma James, you can go to our website at democracynow.org.

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Mon, 16 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400As Obama Picks Up Union Endorsements, a Debate on Labor's Role in 2012 Campaignhttp://www.democracynow.org/2012/3/15/as_obama_picks_up_union_endorsements
tag:democracynow.org,2012-03-15:en/story/edc142 JUAN GONZALEZ : President Obama&#8217;s re-election campaign received a major boost this week with the endorsement from the AFL - CIO , the nation&#8217;s largest labor federation. In a statement, AFL - CIO President Richard Trumka said, quote, &quot;With our endorsement today, we affirm our faith in him—and pledge to work with him through the election and his second term to restore fairness, security and shared prosperity.&quot; The AFL - CIO joins a number of number of other prominent unions backing Obama, including the Service Employees International Union; the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; the AFT ; and the Communications Workers of America.
While the endorsements don&#8217;t come as a surprise, they have touched off a debate within some of the labor movement on the role labor unions should play in electoral politics. The unions opted to endorse Obama at an early stage in his re-election bid despite grievances over a number of issues, including his handling of the job crisis, his educational policies, the abandonment of the Employee Free Choice Act, and his selection of General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt to chair the President&#8217;s jobs council.
We&#8217;re joined now by two guests. Here in our New York studio is Arthur Cheliotes, president of Local 1180 of the Communications Workers of America, a union that has endorsed President Obama. And joining us in Washington, D.C., is Mike Elk, staff writer for the magazine In These Times_. His latest endorsement/&quot;&gt;piece is titled &quot;Not All Labor Leaders Happy with AFL -CIO&#8217;s Obama Endorsement.&quot;
Welcome to you, both. And Arthur, start with you. The early endorsement of President Obama, what it means, and why you believe it was necessary to do so?
ARTHUR CHELIOTES : Look at the choices. We live in an alleged democracy, but basically we have two choices to make. And there is no doubt that Barack Obama is the better choice. And so, we have to—we live in this real world. It&#8217;s not a theoretical world. And we don&#8217;t have the luxury of standing on the sidelines. We have to engage. And given these choices, it is clearly for Barack Obama, for what he&#8217;s done, the appointments that he&#8217;s made, the difference he&#8217;s made to the National Labor Relations Board, the economic recovery, the $7.8 billion that he put into the Recovery Act. All of these things make it clear that, given the alternative that the Republicans are offering—I mean, they want a theocracy, it seems. It&#8217;s crazy. And so, we made the obvious choice.
AMY GOODMAN : Mike Elk, you&#8217;re a labor journalist. Why are you so critical of this decision?
MIKE ELK : Well, first, let me point out something. In my article, I quoted the president of the South Carolina AFL - CIO , who was critical of the AFL -CIO&#8217;s very, very early endorsement of President Obama, about six months before the even Democratic National Convention. And just to give you an idea of how much organized labor doesn&#8217;t want this to be talked about, Donna Dewitt, the president of the South Carolina AFL - CIO , was called by a top AFL - CIO official and reminded that the AFL - CIO funds her, and they don&#8217;t expect this kind of behavior. It was an implicit threat, because this is an embarrassing subject for organized labor to talk about.
You know, despite the talk of political independence that many in organized labor have been talking about for the last year, organized labor is still stuck in this Stockholm Syndrome of President Obama. Sure, it&#8217;s one thing to, you know, vote against Romney. It&#8217;s another to say, as Richard Trumka did, that Obama has been fighting aggressively for workers and unions. Let&#8217;s look at the last month alone. Obama has passed three very anti-worker measures. Let&#8217;s look at one. He passed an anti-union FAA bill, which, Arthur, your own president, Larry Cohen, described as making the rights of airline workers to unionize worse than it ever was. Union rights for airline workers are now worse than they were under Bush. And this is the only piece—
AMY GOODMAN : I want to—Mike, I want to interrupt for one minute, because we actually have the clip of Larry Cohen and wanted to get Arthur to respond.
MIKE ELK : Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : Larry Cohen, the president of CWA , blasting these controversial provisions in the FAA reauthorization bill that make it harder for airline and railroad workers to form unions. Cohen was speaking in early February. President Obama signed the bill two weeks later.
LARRY COHEN : It means that, by statute, workers that are gone forever, 10 years, 20 years, it could be anything. Employer puts them on the list. You need a majority of the whole list, so you don&#8217;t even get an election. And the one provision, the one advancement since the 2008 elections that we have, the only advancement in the entire country, as we&#8217;re under attack every minute? That&#8217;s a rule. That&#8217;s not even in this statute. The leadership in the Senate didn&#8217;t even see fit to include in this gutting of the statute the rule that Delta is objecting to in the first place, the rule that says, oh, it&#8217;s a majority of those voting, not a majority of the whole electorate—if you can get to an election. So they&#8217;ve changed the rules to get to an election. You now need 50 percent of the so-called electorate. But our one little crumb of an advancement is left as a rule. So the day there&#8217;s ever a Republican president elected—and there&#8217;s now two Republicans and one Democrat—they&#8217;re going to strip the rule. The statue will remain. It&#8217;s worse than it&#8217;s ever been.
AMY GOODMAN : Larry Cohen, president of Communications Workers of America. Arthur Cheliotes is president of Local 1180 of CWA here in New York. Your response?
ARTHUR CHELIOTES : I was at that conference were Larry gave that speech, and we lobbied hard at the Congress to see if we could get the Senate to not make those changes. It was attached to the FAA funding bill, which would have crippled the FAA . And we tried to speak to our senators to have them understand how important this was, because it was Obama&#8217;s appointees to the National Mediation Board that changed the rule and said, no, it&#8217;s wrong that when you go to an election in a—under the Railway Labor Act, that you&#8217;re required to have a majority of all the workers in the organization, not just a majority of those voting. And they changed that. And the reaction of the industry was to work with the Republicans in the Senate and attach this to this important funding bill. And so, it was held hostage. And yes, the President had to make a decision: is this something worth shutting down the FAA over? And he made the decision to sign it. Difficult decision, but not for his lack of trying. The blame there rests clearly with the Senate.
JUAN GONZALEZ : I&#8217;d like to ask Mike Elk, what about the—what Arthur Cheliotes raised at the beginning: there simply is no choice, that the—any one of the Republican candidates are far worse on issues of labor than President Obama is?
MIKE ELK : [inaudible] agree that that&#8217;s true. But here&#8217;s the issue. Why are we endorsing six months early? Look what happened at CWA after they endorsed. Obama signed a bill rolling back their organizing rights. That happened a few days after Obama—CWA endorsed Obama.
I think the issue here is we&#8217;ve got to be honest with our members. And I think sort of the glossing over that Richard Trumka and other leaders of the labor movement does really hurts the credibility of labor leaders. I mean, why should labor leaders stake their credibility on calling Obama a saint to their members, when Obama never stakes his credibility on labor leaders?
I mean, look at Obama. You know, look at—something happened during the CWA strike. Verizon was trying to cut the healthcare benefits of workers, and they were saying they had to do it because of Obamacare. Now, at the time, I talked to the White House, and I said, &quot;Are you guys going to make a statement that this isn&#8217;t the intention of Obamacare, for private companies to use it to call for massive healthcare concessions?&quot; And the White House wouldn&#8217;t say anything.
The President has never given a single major speech on the topic of improving collective bargaining rights in this country. Indeed, he&#8217;s given speeches like he did at the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in 2009 blasting the rights of teachers&#8217; unions. I mean, the only time in the recent State of the Union that President Obama mentioned unions was when he praised them for giving massive concessions, like the auto workers did or like the teachers&#8217; unions did.
Sure, Obama might have created more jobs, but that&#8217;s a temporary band-aid. Unless we improve the ability of organized labor to collectively bargain, we&#8217;re never going to improve wages and really improve this economy. And President Obama, in my opinion, hasn&#8217;t done much, if anything, to help that, and, in many cases, has worked against workers&#8217; rights to collectively bargain. I mean, here was a president who pledged that if workers&#8217; rights were ever under threat, he would get on a picket line. He pledged that he would do this as president. But yet, when Honeywell workers were locked out last year in southern Illinois, President Obama flew to India with the CEO of Honeywell, while those workers were locked out, and never, despite me calling them dozens of times, ever made a statement about this incident.
JUAN GONZALEZ : Arthur Cheliotes, I&#8217;d like to ask you about another aspect of this that doesn&#8217;t get much attention: the impact of the Citizens United case on the ability of labor unions to be involved in presidential campaigns, because not only did Citizens United allow millionaires and billionaires to contribute so much more money to these—to these interest groups now, but it also has freed labor unions to devote much more of their resources to political campaigns. Is that some of the reason why, I guess, the Obama administration and then the unions felt it was necessary to get in early on this campaign in terms of flexing the muscle of the labor movement?
ARTHUR CHELIOTES : I suppose you could say it would be one of the reasons. But I think we also need to understand that in this world of competing media markets, that what I think the Obama campaign is always looking for is something to counter what&#8217;s always in front of people these days, which is the Republican primaries. And what is really going on here is trying to edge out a little bit of space in the media over the—over the road show that is the Republican primary. And an endorsement from the AFL - CIO is a story that will run for a week or so. It will create the kind of controversy that we&#8217;re discussing here right now, but will keep Obama&#8217;s name in the forefront. I mean, he has a lot of power being the president, to begin with, but I think it&#8217;s part of the overall media strategy that you see at play in keeping people&#8217;s attention on your candidate, as well.
AMY GOODMAN : But to do it so early means that you are not making demands of President Obama that he has to meet certain goals in order for the AFL or SEIU to endorse. Both did.
ARTHUR CHELIOTES : I suppose you could say that. But then, if you look what was achievable, certainly the Employee Free Choice Act couldn&#8217;t get through Congress, and we took action there. We opposed some senators that had primaries coming up. They eventually lost to Republicans, unfortunately, which made it a tougher vote against labor on a whole host of other issues. So how do we deal with these things, in terms of the political realities of the nation we live in?
AMY GOODMAN : Let&#8217;s turn to President Richard Trumka, president of the AFL - CIO , comments he made last August about President Obama.
RICHARD TRUMKA : I think he made a strategic mistake when he confused job crisis with the deficit crisis a number of months ago, when he would talk about job creation and in the same sentence talk about deficit reduction, and people got the two confused. And he helped with that. And I think that was a strategic mistake. And he started playing on the Republican ground of deficit reduction. Look, we don&#8217;t have a short-term deficit crisis. It does not exist. We have a short-term jobs crisis. And if you fix the job crisis, the deficit crisis goes away.
JUAN GONZALEZ : Mike Elk, what about those comments of Richard Trumka? And also, the allegations by some folks that in the huge labor battle in Wisconsin, President Obama was MIA ?
MIKE ELK : Yeah. Well, this is what I&#8217;m talking about. Organized labor leaders last year were saying, you know, pretty critical things of President Obama. Now Trumka turned around this week and said Obama has been fighting aggressively for workers&#8217; rights, health and safety in their jobs. And now he comes back, and, you know, it really hurts the credibility of labor leaders with their members. And if you want, you know, members to fight for their unions, to potentially, in an organizing drive, risk getting fired or, in a strike, risk losing their home, you have to have credibility, you have to be honest with them. So I think it really hurts the credibility when labor leaders say one thing in an off election year and another thing in an election year.
About Wisconsin, now this is an interesting situation. AFSCME , the largest public employees union in the country, has pledged to spend $100 million re-electing President Obama. Yet, in the state of Wisconsin, you know, Wisconsin membership, since the Walker bill has taken effect, the amount of members contributing dues has dropped by almost two-thirds. But yet, in Wisconsin, they&#8217;re laying off organizers, when they need to be rehiring organizers. And instead, that money is being poured into re-electing President Obama. Now I think it&#8217;s a big, huge strategic mistake that President Obama has never made a single major speech on the issue of workers&#8217; rights. Sure, he can&#8217;t pass workers&#8217; rights provisions through the Senate. But like climate change and immigration, where he both gave major speeches, he could say something.
AMY GOODMAN : Mike Elk, we&#8217;re going to have to leave it there. I want to thank you for being with us, of In These Times , labor journalist, and Arthur Cheliotes, president of Local 1180, Communications Workers of America, part of the AFL - CIO , which endorsed early President Obama. JUANGONZALEZ: President Obama’s re-election campaign received a major boost this week with the endorsement from the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor federation. In a statement, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said, quote, "With our endorsement today, we affirm our faith in him—and pledge to work with him through the election and his second term to restore fairness, security and shared prosperity." The AFL-CIO joins a number of number of other prominent unions backing Obama, including the Service Employees International Union; the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; the AFT; and the Communications Workers of America.

While the endorsements don’t come as a surprise, they have touched off a debate within some of the labor movement on the role labor unions should play in electoral politics. The unions opted to endorse Obama at an early stage in his re-election bid despite grievances over a number of issues, including his handling of the job crisis, his educational policies, the abandonment of the Employee Free Choice Act, and his selection of General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt to chair the President’s jobs council.

We’re joined now by two guests. Here in our New York studio is Arthur Cheliotes, president of Local 1180 of the Communications Workers of America, a union that has endorsed President Obama. And joining us in Washington, D.C., is Mike Elk, staff writer for the magazine In These Times_. His latest endorsement/">piece is titled "Not All Labor Leaders Happy with AFL-CIO’s Obama Endorsement."

Welcome to you, both. And Arthur, start with you. The early endorsement of President Obama, what it means, and why you believe it was necessary to do so?

ARTHURCHELIOTES: Look at the choices. We live in an alleged democracy, but basically we have two choices to make. And there is no doubt that Barack Obama is the better choice. And so, we have to—we live in this real world. It’s not a theoretical world. And we don’t have the luxury of standing on the sidelines. We have to engage. And given these choices, it is clearly for Barack Obama, for what he’s done, the appointments that he’s made, the difference he’s made to the National Labor Relations Board, the economic recovery, the $7.8 billion that he put into the Recovery Act. All of these things make it clear that, given the alternative that the Republicans are offering—I mean, they want a theocracy, it seems. It’s crazy. And so, we made the obvious choice.

AMYGOODMAN: Mike Elk, you’re a labor journalist. Why are you so critical of this decision?

MIKEELK: Well, first, let me point out something. In my article, I quoted the president of the South Carolina AFL-CIO, who was critical of the AFL-CIO’s very, very early endorsement of President Obama, about six months before the even Democratic National Convention. And just to give you an idea of how much organized labor doesn’t want this to be talked about, Donna Dewitt, the president of the South Carolina AFL-CIO, was called by a top AFL-CIO official and reminded that the AFL-CIO funds her, and they don’t expect this kind of behavior. It was an implicit threat, because this is an embarrassing subject for organized labor to talk about.

You know, despite the talk of political independence that many in organized labor have been talking about for the last year, organized labor is still stuck in this Stockholm Syndrome of President Obama. Sure, it’s one thing to, you know, vote against Romney. It’s another to say, as Richard Trumka did, that Obama has been fighting aggressively for workers and unions. Let’s look at the last month alone. Obama has passed three very anti-worker measures. Let’s look at one. He passed an anti-union FAA bill, which, Arthur, your own president, Larry Cohen, described as making the rights of airline workers to unionize worse than it ever was. Union rights for airline workers are now worse than they were under Bush. And this is the only piece—

AMYGOODMAN: I want to—Mike, I want to interrupt for one minute, because we actually have the clip of Larry Cohen and wanted to get Arthur to respond.

MIKEELK: Yeah.

AMYGOODMAN: Larry Cohen, the president of CWA, blasting these controversial provisions in the FAA reauthorization bill that make it harder for airline and railroad workers to form unions. Cohen was speaking in early February. President Obama signed the bill two weeks later.

LARRYCOHEN: It means that, by statute, workers that are gone forever, 10 years, 20 years, it could be anything. Employer puts them on the list. You need a majority of the whole list, so you don’t even get an election. And the one provision, the one advancement since the 2008 elections that we have, the only advancement in the entire country, as we’re under attack every minute? That’s a rule. That’s not even in this statute. The leadership in the Senate didn’t even see fit to include in this gutting of the statute the rule that Delta is objecting to in the first place, the rule that says, oh, it’s a majority of those voting, not a majority of the whole electorate—if you can get to an election. So they’ve changed the rules to get to an election. You now need 50 percent of the so-called electorate. But our one little crumb of an advancement is left as a rule. So the day there’s ever a Republican president elected—and there’s now two Republicans and one Democrat—they’re going to strip the rule. The statue will remain. It’s worse than it’s ever been.

AMYGOODMAN: Larry Cohen, president of Communications Workers of America. Arthur Cheliotes is president of Local 1180 of CWA here in New York. Your response?

ARTHURCHELIOTES: I was at that conference were Larry gave that speech, and we lobbied hard at the Congress to see if we could get the Senate to not make those changes. It was attached to the FAA funding bill, which would have crippled the FAA. And we tried to speak to our senators to have them understand how important this was, because it was Obama’s appointees to the National Mediation Board that changed the rule and said, no, it’s wrong that when you go to an election in a—under the Railway Labor Act, that you’re required to have a majority of all the workers in the organization, not just a majority of those voting. And they changed that. And the reaction of the industry was to work with the Republicans in the Senate and attach this to this important funding bill. And so, it was held hostage. And yes, the President had to make a decision: is this something worth shutting down the FAA over? And he made the decision to sign it. Difficult decision, but not for his lack of trying. The blame there rests clearly with the Senate.

JUANGONZALEZ: I’d like to ask Mike Elk, what about the—what Arthur Cheliotes raised at the beginning: there simply is no choice, that the—any one of the Republican candidates are far worse on issues of labor than President Obama is?

MIKEELK: [inaudible] agree that that’s true. But here’s the issue. Why are we endorsing six months early? Look what happened at CWA after they endorsed. Obama signed a bill rolling back their organizing rights. That happened a few days after Obama—CWA endorsed Obama.

I think the issue here is we’ve got to be honest with our members. And I think sort of the glossing over that Richard Trumka and other leaders of the labor movement does really hurts the credibility of labor leaders. I mean, why should labor leaders stake their credibility on calling Obama a saint to their members, when Obama never stakes his credibility on labor leaders?

I mean, look at Obama. You know, look at—something happened during the CWA strike. Verizon was trying to cut the healthcare benefits of workers, and they were saying they had to do it because of Obamacare. Now, at the time, I talked to the White House, and I said, "Are you guys going to make a statement that this isn’t the intention of Obamacare, for private companies to use it to call for massive healthcare concessions?" And the White House wouldn’t say anything.

The President has never given a single major speech on the topic of improving collective bargaining rights in this country. Indeed, he’s given speeches like he did at the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in 2009 blasting the rights of teachers’ unions. I mean, the only time in the recent State of the Union that President Obama mentioned unions was when he praised them for giving massive concessions, like the auto workers did or like the teachers’ unions did.

Sure, Obama might have created more jobs, but that’s a temporary band-aid. Unless we improve the ability of organized labor to collectively bargain, we’re never going to improve wages and really improve this economy. And President Obama, in my opinion, hasn’t done much, if anything, to help that, and, in many cases, has worked against workers’ rights to collectively bargain. I mean, here was a president who pledged that if workers’ rights were ever under threat, he would get on a picket line. He pledged that he would do this as president. But yet, when Honeywell workers were locked out last year in southern Illinois, President Obama flew to India with the CEO of Honeywell, while those workers were locked out, and never, despite me calling them dozens of times, ever made a statement about this incident.

JUANGONZALEZ: Arthur Cheliotes, I’d like to ask you about another aspect of this that doesn’t get much attention: the impact of the Citizens United case on the ability of labor unions to be involved in presidential campaigns, because not only did Citizens United allow millionaires and billionaires to contribute so much more money to these—to these interest groups now, but it also has freed labor unions to devote much more of their resources to political campaigns. Is that some of the reason why, I guess, the Obama administration and then the unions felt it was necessary to get in early on this campaign in terms of flexing the muscle of the labor movement?

ARTHURCHELIOTES: I suppose you could say it would be one of the reasons. But I think we also need to understand that in this world of competing media markets, that what I think the Obama campaign is always looking for is something to counter what’s always in front of people these days, which is the Republican primaries. And what is really going on here is trying to edge out a little bit of space in the media over the—over the road show that is the Republican primary. And an endorsement from the AFL-CIO is a story that will run for a week or so. It will create the kind of controversy that we’re discussing here right now, but will keep Obama’s name in the forefront. I mean, he has a lot of power being the president, to begin with, but I think it’s part of the overall media strategy that you see at play in keeping people’s attention on your candidate, as well.

AMYGOODMAN: But to do it so early means that you are not making demands of President Obama that he has to meet certain goals in order for the AFL or SEIU to endorse. Both did.

ARTHURCHELIOTES: I suppose you could say that. But then, if you look what was achievable, certainly the Employee Free Choice Act couldn’t get through Congress, and we took action there. We opposed some senators that had primaries coming up. They eventually lost to Republicans, unfortunately, which made it a tougher vote against labor on a whole host of other issues. So how do we deal with these things, in terms of the political realities of the nation we live in?

AMYGOODMAN: Let’s turn to President Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, comments he made last August about President Obama.

RICHARDTRUMKA: I think he made a strategic mistake when he confused job crisis with the deficit crisis a number of months ago, when he would talk about job creation and in the same sentence talk about deficit reduction, and people got the two confused. And he helped with that. And I think that was a strategic mistake. And he started playing on the Republican ground of deficit reduction. Look, we don’t have a short-term deficit crisis. It does not exist. We have a short-term jobs crisis. And if you fix the job crisis, the deficit crisis goes away.

JUANGONZALEZ: Mike Elk, what about those comments of Richard Trumka? And also, the allegations by some folks that in the huge labor battle in Wisconsin, President Obama was MIA?

MIKEELK: Yeah. Well, this is what I’m talking about. Organized labor leaders last year were saying, you know, pretty critical things of President Obama. Now Trumka turned around this week and said Obama has been fighting aggressively for workers’ rights, health and safety in their jobs. And now he comes back, and, you know, it really hurts the credibility of labor leaders with their members. And if you want, you know, members to fight for their unions, to potentially, in an organizing drive, risk getting fired or, in a strike, risk losing their home, you have to have credibility, you have to be honest with them. So I think it really hurts the credibility when labor leaders say one thing in an off election year and another thing in an election year.

About Wisconsin, now this is an interesting situation. AFSCME, the largest public employees union in the country, has pledged to spend $100 million re-electing President Obama. Yet, in the state of Wisconsin, you know, Wisconsin membership, since the Walker bill has taken effect, the amount of members contributing dues has dropped by almost two-thirds. But yet, in Wisconsin, they’re laying off organizers, when they need to be rehiring organizers. And instead, that money is being poured into re-electing President Obama. Now I think it’s a big, huge strategic mistake that President Obama has never made a single major speech on the issue of workers’ rights. Sure, he can’t pass workers’ rights provisions through the Senate. But like climate change and immigration, where he both gave major speeches, he could say something.

AMYGOODMAN: Mike Elk, we’re going to have to leave it there. I want to thank you for being with us, of In These Times, labor journalist, and Arthur Cheliotes, president of Local 1180, Communications Workers of America, part of the AFL-CIO, which endorsed early President Obama.

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Thu, 15 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0400Author Russell Banks on Writing Through the Voices of Outcasts, Criminals and Revolutionarieshttp://www.democracynow.org/2011/12/28/author_russell_banks_on_writing_through
tag:democracynow.org,2011-12-28:en/story/7b410b AMY GOODMAN : We turn now to the highly acclaimed novelist Russell Banks. His new novel explores the plight of sex offenders trying to live among us as outcasts. Banks is a two-time Pulitzer finalist who has written a dozen novels and several short story collections. He is known for drawing on his working-class background to write about criminals and outcasts. In his past novels, such as Cloudsplitter , he focused on revolutionary abolitionist John Brown, and his novel Affliction revolved around a paranoid alcoholic. His book Rule of the Bone was about a 14-year-old drug dealer. Both Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter were adapted into feature films.
I recently spoke with Russell Banks and started by asking him about his new novel, Lost Memory of Skin , about a 22-year-old homeless man known as the Kid, who lives with a group of convicted sex offenders under a causeway in Florida.
RUSSELL BANKS : I live about half the year in Miami Beach, and from my—from the terrace of my apartment, I could look out on the Causeway, the Julia Tuttle Causeway, which connects the mainland, Miami, to Miami Beach. And about four years ago, articles started appearing in the Miami Herald about a colony—I really can&#8217;t call it much else than that—of men who were convicted sex offenders, who had served their time. And they were dropped off, with the connivance of the local law authorities and parole officers and so forth, underneath this bridge and were living there. They couldn&#8217;t live, as you said, anywhere within 2,500 feet of where children gather, which essentially meant there was no place in the city for them to live. So there they were clustered together in this squalid encampment. And I could look out and see it.
And I just started wondering, what on earth is going on? You talk about the unintended consequences of good intentions or blowback, and here we have it, on a very domestic level, because here were, yes, psychopathic serial rapists right alongside some poor old drunk who got caught urinating in a parking lot and was convicted of indecent exposure, which is a sex crime, or a kid who had had sex with his—I mean, a 21- or a 20-year-old kid who had sex with his high school girlfriend who was under 18, which is statutory rape. And they were all being lumped together, thrown into a heap there. And I just started being drawn into the—I mean, what a novelist does is try to inhabit someone else&#8217;s life and look out on the world from that point of view. And I just could imagine this kid, who becomes the Kid in the novel, a 22-year-old loser, the kind of kid who kind of slides through life slightly alienated and caught up in the internet and pornography and lost in a kind of dreamscape between—especially regarding his erotic life, between reality and fantasy, and getting caught—
AMY GOODMAN : Served in the military.
RUSSELL BANKS : —crossing a line. Serving in the military and then getting bounced out of the military, a lonely soul, without contact with the real world—but not psychotic, by any means, not mentally ill even. But confused, lost—there are many ways to describe kids like that, and there are millions of them, more and more.
AMY GOODMAN : And then police raid the encampment.
RUSSELL BANKS : Yeah, in the story, the Kid—yeah, the encampment gets raided, and another character appears in here, a professor of sociology, an outsized character—I mean, literally outsized, he weighs a quarter of a ton—and a man who lives in his head, and for whom his body has kind of disappeared, in somewhat the same way the Kid&#8217;s body is disappearing, although the Kid&#8217;s has become digitalized, as it were, and the Professor&#8217;s body is lost in his gluttony and his obsession with food and so forth. And he&#8217;s an intellectual who has theories about everything. And his intention is to kind of save the Kid and to test his theories with regarding—with regard to pedophilia and sex offenses and so forth.
AMY GOODMAN : And then there&#8217;s the journalist.
RUSSELL BANKS : And later, yes, there&#8217;s the Writer, right. Yes.
AMY GOODMAN : Oh, excuse me.
RUSSELL BANKS : Yes, that&#8217;s right, the Writer appears later. And then there&#8217;s the wife and the characters, and then there are all these pseudonyms that the characters under the bridge take on. There&#8217;s the Shyster and the Rabbit, and so forth, Paco and Fruit Loops and the Greek. And in a way, they&#8217;re like trolls living under a bridge. And I wanted to bring the story up out of Miami&#8217;s specific mundane reality of Miami, while still making it realistic, and bring it up into the level of fable, so that it could apply elsewhere, not just be a story about Miami, but about the rest of the country, and maybe even the rest of the West in some ways, but make it more universal or more nearly universal, because it is an interesting and a tragic, in many ways, plight. What do you do with convicted sex offenders?
We do make gradations when we convict them, you know, for a second- or third-class crime, depending on the seriousness of it, violence, if that was involved, and so forth. But after they&#8217;re out, they&#8217;re stuck on the national sex register—National Sex Offender Registry forever. They have usually long periods of parole, 10 periods—10 years where they&#8217;re wearing an anklet, an electronic anklet, where they&#8217;re under surveillance, essentially. And then, in some places now, they&#8217;re trying to extend beyond time served, making it a permanent condition, a lifetime condition. I mean, we&#8217;re just not dealing with the social, psychological, political realities. And increasingly, homelessness—the population of homeless people in cities like New York, or anywhere else in America, are being filled with convicted sex offenders who can&#8217;t live anywhere.
AMY GOODMAN : Did you go to the encampment?
RUSSELL BANKS : Yeah, I walked over, because I could walk from my place, and talked to some of these guys, the kind of research—I&#8217;m a novelist, not a social scientist or a historian or an investigative journalist, so I wanted to know what does it smell like, what is like with the sound of vehicles rumbling overhead 24 hours a day, what&#8217;s it look like, you know, with the bay right there and the water coming up at high tide, and so forth, and just get a sense of it. And I did a lot of the usual kinds of research, as well, you know, where you read and—legal history and psychological analysis and speculation, and so forth, into the subject.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re talking to Russell Banks. His new book is Lost Memory of Skin . Talk about the title.
RUSSELL BANKS : Well, I think that I wanted the title to direct us to the erasure of the hard line which has existed for so long between fantasy and reality, especially when it comes to our erotic lives, our sexual lives, and the erasure that seems to me to have occurred over the last—particularly, at an accelerated rate, over the last decade or so with the digitalization of our erotic life. And as a result of that, we seem to have lost a kind of skin connection we have to other human beings, and instead we&#8217;ve become increasingly self-referential with regard to our erotic connections, because the digitalization of it means, of course—is pointing to pornography and the easy, easy access of it, in fact the difficulty of escaping from it, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the eroticizing of consumer goods, and therefore of consumer goods perusers, like children, and how they, I think, oddly feed each other. And it&#8217;s a phenomenon that you may have remembered a couple of weeks ago: People magazine had a big piece on the front about children with tiaras and beauty contests and so forth. Well, that&#8217;s just another example of it, of this phenomenon.
AMY GOODMAN : You set yourself a very difficult task, because you&#8217;re taking the most unsympathetic characters in society.
RUSSELL BANKS : Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
AMY GOODMAN : You are taking sex offenders.
RUSSELL BANKS : Mm-hmm.
AMY GOODMAN : And yet, you, by meeting them, are showing us all that they deal with this, like the Kid, this young man, who&#8217;s 22 years old. Continually, in trying to get a job, for example, he has to see, is there a school around, is there a movie theater around, is there a—is he allowed into a library, he has to ask.
RUSSELL BANKS : Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : And anyone being able to check the registry.
RUSSELL BANKS : Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
AMY GOODMAN : So you&#8217;re taking on the most difficult task.
RUSSELL BANKS : Yeah, it&#8217;s a taboo subject. It&#8217;s one we don&#8217;t want to think about. We would just as soon it went away somehow. And so, when you bring it back up into a novel, you&#8217;re also bringing up, you hope, that the reader will feel some of the same affection and sympathy for this character as I do, as the author does. It is a risk, I suppose. But, you know, I didn&#8217;t think about it until now, I mean, in a funny way. While writing the book, I was just simply following my own deep personal curiosity and need to understand a life very, very different from my own. Once the book enters the public world, of course, then I have to consider the fact, well, probably not everybody has the same curiosity and interest and desire to understand that I do. And you hope the Kid is sympathetic. And, you know, he&#8217;s funny. He&#8217;s honest. He&#8217;s basically honest and decent, and he wants to be a good person—and is trying very hard. He&#8217;s also ashamed and guilty. And a good deal of his effort in the earlier parts of the book is to try to separate out shame and guilt, because he&#8217;s internalized society&#8217;s view of him as someone who is beneath any kind of civil or personal consideration.
AMY GOODMAN : I wanted to go back to one of your earlier books that was made into a film, The Sweet Hereafter . The novel tells the story of the impact on a small town of a tragic school bus accident that killed many of the town&#8217;s children. In this scene, the father of two of the children confronts an aggressive trial lawyer, who&#8217;s shown up in town to organize the families of the victims into a lawsuit. The confrontation is interrupted by a call from the lawyer&#8217;s adult daughter, a homeless drug addict.
MITCHELL STEVENS : I can help you.
BILLY HANSEL : Not unless you can raise the dead.
MITCHELL STEVENS : Here. You may change your mind.
BILLY HANSEL : Mitchell Stevens, Esquire. Tell me, would you be likely to sue me if I was to beat you right now? I mean, beat you so bad you [bleep] couldn&#8217;t walk for a month, because that&#8217;s what I&#8217;m about to do.
MITCHELL STEVENS : No, Mr. Hansel, I wouldn&#8217;t sue you.
BILLY HANSEL : You leave us alone, Stevens. You leave the people of this town alone. You can&#8217;t help.
MITCHELL STEVENS : You can help each other. Several people in the town have agreed to let me represent them in a negligence suit. Now, your case as an individual will be stronger if I&#8217;m allowed to represent you together as a group.
BILLY HANSEL : Case?
MITCHELL STEVENS : The workers have agreed. The owners have agreed. Nicole Burnell&#8217;s parents. It&#8217;s important that we initiate proceedings right away. Things get covered up. People lie. That&#8217;s why we must begin our investigation quickly, before the evidence disappears. That&#8217;s what I&#8217;m doing out here.
BILLY HANSEL : Listen. I know Risa and Wendell Walker. They wouldn&#8217;t hire a [bleep] lawyer. The Ottos, they wouldn&#8217;t deal with you. We&#8217;re not country bumpkins you can put the big city hustle on.
MITCHELL STEVENS : You&#8217;re angry, Mr. Hansel. And you owe it to yourself to feel that way. All I&#8217;m saying is, let me direct your rage. [phone rings] That&#8217;s my daughter. Or it may be the police to tell me they found her dead. She&#8217;s a drug addict.
BILLY HANSEL : Why are you telling me this?
MITCHELL STEVENS : Why am I telling you this, Mr. Hansel? I&#8217;m—because we&#8217;ve all lost our children. They&#8217;re dead to us. They&#8217;re killing each other in the streets. They wander, comatose, shopping malls. Something terrible has happened. It&#8217;s taken our children away. It&#8217;s too late. They&#8217;re gone.
AMY GOODMAN : Russell Banks, in your novel The Sweet Hereafter , as in your latest novel, Lost Memory of Skin , you write about lost childhood. Can you talk about this recurrent theme in your writing?
RUSSELL BANKS : You&#8217;re right. It does. It comes again. Rule of the Bone is really about that. And I&#8217;m not sure. I think I&#8217;m drawn to, again and again, the story of lost child. The abandoned child may be more the case. The child is not simply lost from home; there is no home in most of these cases. Perhaps, I endured a version of that, myself, as a child. But it&#8217;s—
AMY GOODMAN : Where did you grow up?
RUSSELL BANKS : In New Hampshire and eastern Massachusetts, in a broken family. My father abandoned the family when I was about 12, and I was the oldest of four. My mother raised us from there. But I think, more recently—I mean, in recent years, more—since I&#8217;m well along in adulthood, I&#8217;ve become increasingly aware of something that&#8217;s species deep, it seems to me, having been abandoned. And that&#8217;s the need to protect the weakest among us, who are always children, the most vulnerable among us. And in the last half-century—I&#8217;m old enough so I can remember the last half-century pretty well—there seems to have been a shift away from that impulse, where we&#8217;ve given it up somehow, or we&#8217;ve been seduced away from that responsibility now over several generations.
You know all those old jokes about keeping a salesman out of the—out of the house, you know, where you slam the door on his foot, and he comes in over the transom; you close the transom, he comes through the window; you close the window. They&#8217;re describing a deep impulse, which is to protect the children against the amoral forces of nature—maybe the climate, the saber-toothed tiger and the tribe over the hill. Well, the amoral forces of nature now really are the consumer economy. And when we allow the salesman to come through the door and sit down in the living room, we&#8217;ve abandoned that responsibility to protect the home from that force of nature. And then when we take the salesman in and put it in the bedroom and make it a babysitter for the kids, we&#8217;ve really turned the kids over to the salesman and to the consumer economy. And that phenomenon, to me, is a powerfully—it&#8217;s a very important and altering phenomenon, one that has taken place gradually, slowly, over several generations. And I think that the abandoned children, the lost children, in some way reflect all that.
AMY GOODMAN : As George Gerbner, the founder of the Cultural Environment Movement, said—he was the former dean of the Annenberg School of Communications—about corporations and children, we have turned our children over to corporations who have &quot;nothing to tell and everything to sell that are raising our children today.&quot;
RUSSELL BANKS : That&#8217;s right. That&#8217;s right, exactly. Yeah, and it&#8217;s brilliant for marketing purposes, because children replace themselves. You know, you sell one group of kids, one group of 11-year-olds sneakers, and then next year there&#8217;s a whole new bunch of 11-year-olds who need sneakers, and you just keep on moving.
AMY GOODMAN : Novelist Russell Banks, author of The Sweet Hereafter . His new book is Lost Memory of Skin . We&#8217;ll come back to our interview with him in 30 seconds.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : We return to my interview with the highly acclaimed novelist, the two-time Pulitzer finalist, Russell Banks. I asked him about his historical novel Cloudsplitter , about the abolitionist John Brown.
RUSSELL BANKS : Well, where do we start? It took me 950 or 970 pages to get a novel that tried to encompass his life.
AMY GOODMAN : Cloudsplitter , why is it called that?
RUSSELL BANKS : Well, he broke through the clouds, in a way. It was the name of a mountain in the Adirondacks where he had a farm, and he&#8217;s buried just down the road from my house, in fact, along with 13 of the other men who were killed at Harpers Ferry, or executed afterwards.
AMY GOODMAN : And that was in the year...?
RUSSELL BANKS : 1859. And in October, as is mostly well known, I mean, in 1859, he went into Harpers Ferry for the—
AMY GOODMAN : Assume no history is well known.
RUSSELL BANKS : That&#8217;s true, I suppose.
AMY GOODMAN : As it all goes down the memory hole.
RUSSELL BANKS : Right, right. But Brown sort of stood at that crossroads of religion and violence in American—the American imagination, and righteous wrath, if you will, or principled violence. And he was our homegrown terrorist, but he was a terrorist for a cause that certainly today we&#8217;re universally in support of, which is the ending of slavery. And so, his story is still a very complicated one for most Americans. And even to today, he&#8217;s regarded by most African Americans as a heroic figure of the first order—among whites, placed even above Abraham Lincoln. I mean, Malcolm X and James Baldwin and W.E.B. Du Bois saw him that way. And among whites, generally, most whites, Americans, view him as a madman—well-intended madman. But nobody disagrees about the facts. The facts have been known since the day of the raid, since, you know, the time the events occurred. But it&#8217;s an amazing kind of opposite views of regarding the meaning of the facts. And so, that&#8217;s what drew me to Brown&#8217;s story, more than probably anything else. It was written well before 9/11, but it does, in a way, deal with the question of terrorism. And what—you know, because he was clearly a terrorist, quite a conscious and deliberate terrorist. He was killing some people in order to strike fear in the heart of many others.
AMY GOODMAN : I wanted to turn to your sense of place in your writing. We recently interviewed Professor Michael Zweig, who did this thorough study of the soldiers who have died in Afghanistan, at the count at the end of 2010, something—more than 1,400. He found the highest casualty rate across the country occurs among white soldiers from rural counties in upstate New York.
RUSSELL BANKS : Mm-hmm.
AMY GOODMAN : Can you talk about the hard life and characters from the north country.
RUSSELL BANKS : Mm-hmm. Yeah, in the town square where I live in upstate, in the Adirondacks, there&#8217;s a—I won&#8217;t call it quite a shrine, but there&#8217;s a memorial to all the townsmen who have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they keep on adding a new name every few months. And everybody knows those people there, their families. It&#8217;s a small town. You know these kids, you know. They&#8217;ve seen them go up through school and everything.
AMY GOODMAN : What town is that?
RUSSELL BANKS : Keene, New York. And you know their parents. You know their grandparents and so forth. They&#8217;re mostly working-class, I think. They&#8217;re not impoverished. They&#8217;re not lost, and so on. And they tend to view the military both as a patriotic opportunity, opportunity to express their patriotism and citizenship, on the one hand, but also a way perhaps to get education, formal education, higher education, because they&#8217;re moving in that direction, and they want to enter the middle class. They&#8217;re all white. The region is all white. And their parents and families are, by and large, extremely patriotic and vote Republican, and support—supported the policies of George W. Bush right down the line and are critical of the policies of Barack Obama right down the line. Go figure. They—
AMY GOODMAN : Even though Afghanistan is now Obama&#8217;s war.
RUSSELL BANKS : Yeah, yeah. And their kids are dying in it, and so on, and are—I mean, beyond that, it&#8217;s hard to say. But I think it&#8217;s important to note that these are—they&#8217;re white and that they&#8217;re striving people, strivers, trying to enter the middle class from the blue collar, from working class.
AMY GOODMAN : You&#8217;ve written fiction. That&#8217;s what you&#8217;re known for, your novels. You&#8217;ve written nonfiction, collections of short stories.
RUSSELL BANKS : Mm-hmm.
AMY GOODMAN : Talk about the difference and what you prefer.
RUSSELL BANKS : Also written screenplays, too. Well, I think I&#8217;m happiest writing fiction, and in particular, novels. Novels seem to create, for me—or allow the possibility of creating for me—an alternative universe, that&#8217;s comprehensive and large enough to let me think in ways I can&#8217;t think otherwise. The tradition of the novel and, I think, the rigor and the discipline of the art force me to be smarter than I am any other time and force me to be more honest than I am at any other time and force me to be more attentive than I am at any other time. So in some ways, a novel allows me to be better than I am the rest of the time in my life, and I think that&#8217;s why I prefer to work in that large fictional form.
AMY GOODMAN : And when you write the screenplay for your film — there was Affliction , there was The Sweet Hereafter — did you—
RUSSELL BANKS : I&#8217;m doing also Rule of the Bone and The Darling , as well, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : So you&#8217;re controlling a lot of—
RUSSELL BANKS : The person—whoever writes the check out ends up controlling it, yeah, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : What&#8217;s it like, these figures in your head become real on the screen? What is that like for you?
RUSSELL BANKS : Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : And where are novels going these days? Is it all either movies, or it doesn&#8217;t happen?
RUSSELL BANKS : No, I think the novel is not being threatened by film, I don&#8217;t think, or by visual media. I think what the novel does and what films do, they&#8217;re basically delivery systems for story. And the species will always require story. And they&#8217;re different, radically different, types of delivery system. Different type of story gets delivered in film than gets delivered in the novel. But I&#8217;m not too worried about either one taking over or dominating the other, because we, as human beings, need the form of story that comes in a novel. It&#8217;s interactive. We help create the story as we read it. And we also need and relish the form of story that gets delivered by film, where we&#8217;re a passive observer and not an active participant, as well. But story is what tells us, finally, what it is to be human beings. And we need to know. I mean, there&#8217;s no other way as a species we can know what it is to be ourself. And we&#8217;re the only species for whom that&#8217;s true.
AMY GOODMAN : Finally, what do you attribute your need to, your desire for, expressing yourself through writing. You describe coming from a broken home, your dad leaving when you were 12.
RUSSELL BANKS : Mm-hmm.
AMY GOODMAN : What contributes to—and would you say it&#8217;s something you need to do?
RUSSELL BANKS : Well, I do. I think there are several sources for it, and it&#8217;s only—there are probably a lot of sources I don&#8217;t even know about or aren&#8217;t even aware of. I know that as a kid in a broken *home that was marred by alcoholism and violence and so forth, storytelling was a way, just within the circle of the family, for me and my brothers and so on, and for myself, to save ourselves. We could make sense of an otherwise incoherent life for children. And then, as I grew older, it continued to function that way. As my world expanded beyond the family and out into the larger world, storytelling still was a way for me to make sense of an otherwise incoherent reality.
AMY GOODMAN : Novelist Russell Banks, author of Cloudsplitter , The Darling , Affliction , Rule of the Bone , The Sweet Hereafter . His newest is Lost Memory of Skin .
Coming up, Alaa Abd El Fattah, the prominent Egyptian blogger and activist. He has just been released from two months in military detention. His wife gave birth to their first child while he was in jail. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute. AMYGOODMAN: We turn now to the highly acclaimed novelist Russell Banks. His new novel explores the plight of sex offenders trying to live among us as outcasts. Banks is a two-time Pulitzer finalist who has written a dozen novels and several short story collections. He is known for drawing on his working-class background to write about criminals and outcasts. In his past novels, such as Cloudsplitter, he focused on revolutionary abolitionist John Brown, and his novel Affliction revolved around a paranoid alcoholic. His book Rule of the Bone was about a 14-year-old drug dealer. Both Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter were adapted into feature films.

I recently spoke with Russell Banks and started by asking him about his new novel, Lost Memory of Skin, about a 22-year-old homeless man known as the Kid, who lives with a group of convicted sex offenders under a causeway in Florida.

RUSSELLBANKS: I live about half the year in Miami Beach, and from my—from the terrace of my apartment, I could look out on the Causeway, the Julia Tuttle Causeway, which connects the mainland, Miami, to Miami Beach. And about four years ago, articles started appearing in the Miami Herald about a colony—I really can’t call it much else than that—of men who were convicted sex offenders, who had served their time. And they were dropped off, with the connivance of the local law authorities and parole officers and so forth, underneath this bridge and were living there. They couldn’t live, as you said, anywhere within 2,500 feet of where children gather, which essentially meant there was no place in the city for them to live. So there they were clustered together in this squalid encampment. And I could look out and see it.

And I just started wondering, what on earth is going on? You talk about the unintended consequences of good intentions or blowback, and here we have it, on a very domestic level, because here were, yes, psychopathic serial rapists right alongside some poor old drunk who got caught urinating in a parking lot and was convicted of indecent exposure, which is a sex crime, or a kid who had had sex with his—I mean, a 21- or a 20-year-old kid who had sex with his high school girlfriend who was under 18, which is statutory rape. And they were all being lumped together, thrown into a heap there. And I just started being drawn into the—I mean, what a novelist does is try to inhabit someone else’s life and look out on the world from that point of view. And I just could imagine this kid, who becomes the Kid in the novel, a 22-year-old loser, the kind of kid who kind of slides through life slightly alienated and caught up in the internet and pornography and lost in a kind of dreamscape between—especially regarding his erotic life, between reality and fantasy, and getting caught—

AMYGOODMAN: Served in the military.

RUSSELLBANKS: —crossing a line. Serving in the military and then getting bounced out of the military, a lonely soul, without contact with the real world—but not psychotic, by any means, not mentally ill even. But confused, lost—there are many ways to describe kids like that, and there are millions of them, more and more.

AMYGOODMAN: And then police raid the encampment.

RUSSELLBANKS: Yeah, in the story, the Kid—yeah, the encampment gets raided, and another character appears in here, a professor of sociology, an outsized character—I mean, literally outsized, he weighs a quarter of a ton—and a man who lives in his head, and for whom his body has kind of disappeared, in somewhat the same way the Kid’s body is disappearing, although the Kid’s has become digitalized, as it were, and the Professor’s body is lost in his gluttony and his obsession with food and so forth. And he’s an intellectual who has theories about everything. And his intention is to kind of save the Kid and to test his theories with regarding—with regard to pedophilia and sex offenses and so forth.

AMYGOODMAN: And then there’s the journalist.

RUSSELLBANKS: And later, yes, there’s the Writer, right. Yes.

AMYGOODMAN: Oh, excuse me.

RUSSELLBANKS: Yes, that’s right, the Writer appears later. And then there’s the wife and the characters, and then there are all these pseudonyms that the characters under the bridge take on. There’s the Shyster and the Rabbit, and so forth, Paco and Fruit Loops and the Greek. And in a way, they’re like trolls living under a bridge. And I wanted to bring the story up out of Miami’s specific mundane reality of Miami, while still making it realistic, and bring it up into the level of fable, so that it could apply elsewhere, not just be a story about Miami, but about the rest of the country, and maybe even the rest of the West in some ways, but make it more universal or more nearly universal, because it is an interesting and a tragic, in many ways, plight. What do you do with convicted sex offenders?

We do make gradations when we convict them, you know, for a second- or third-class crime, depending on the seriousness of it, violence, if that was involved, and so forth. But after they’re out, they’re stuck on the national sex register—National Sex Offender Registry forever. They have usually long periods of parole, 10 periods—10 years where they’re wearing an anklet, an electronic anklet, where they’re under surveillance, essentially. And then, in some places now, they’re trying to extend beyond time served, making it a permanent condition, a lifetime condition. I mean, we’re just not dealing with the social, psychological, political realities. And increasingly, homelessness—the population of homeless people in cities like New York, or anywhere else in America, are being filled with convicted sex offenders who can’t live anywhere.

AMYGOODMAN: Did you go to the encampment?

RUSSELLBANKS: Yeah, I walked over, because I could walk from my place, and talked to some of these guys, the kind of research—I’m a novelist, not a social scientist or a historian or an investigative journalist, so I wanted to know what does it smell like, what is like with the sound of vehicles rumbling overhead 24 hours a day, what’s it look like, you know, with the bay right there and the water coming up at high tide, and so forth, and just get a sense of it. And I did a lot of the usual kinds of research, as well, you know, where you read and—legal history and psychological analysis and speculation, and so forth, into the subject.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re talking to Russell Banks. His new book is Lost Memory of Skin. Talk about the title.

RUSSELLBANKS: Well, I think that I wanted the title to direct us to the erasure of the hard line which has existed for so long between fantasy and reality, especially when it comes to our erotic lives, our sexual lives, and the erasure that seems to me to have occurred over the last—particularly, at an accelerated rate, over the last decade or so with the digitalization of our erotic life. And as a result of that, we seem to have lost a kind of skin connection we have to other human beings, and instead we’ve become increasingly self-referential with regard to our erotic connections, because the digitalization of it means, of course—is pointing to pornography and the easy, easy access of it, in fact the difficulty of escaping from it, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the eroticizing of consumer goods, and therefore of consumer goods perusers, like children, and how they, I think, oddly feed each other. And it’s a phenomenon that you may have remembered a couple of weeks ago: People magazine had a big piece on the front about children with tiaras and beauty contests and so forth. Well, that’s just another example of it, of this phenomenon.

AMYGOODMAN: You set yourself a very difficult task, because you’re taking the most unsympathetic characters in society.

RUSSELLBANKS: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

AMYGOODMAN: You are taking sex offenders.

RUSSELLBANKS: Mm-hmm.

AMYGOODMAN: And yet, you, by meeting them, are showing us all that they deal with this, like the Kid, this young man, who’s 22 years old. Continually, in trying to get a job, for example, he has to see, is there a school around, is there a movie theater around, is there a—is he allowed into a library, he has to ask.

RUSSELLBANKS: Yeah.

AMYGOODMAN: And anyone being able to check the registry.

RUSSELLBANKS: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

AMYGOODMAN: So you’re taking on the most difficult task.

RUSSELLBANKS: Yeah, it’s a taboo subject. It’s one we don’t want to think about. We would just as soon it went away somehow. And so, when you bring it back up into a novel, you’re also bringing up, you hope, that the reader will feel some of the same affection and sympathy for this character as I do, as the author does. It is a risk, I suppose. But, you know, I didn’t think about it until now, I mean, in a funny way. While writing the book, I was just simply following my own deep personal curiosity and need to understand a life very, very different from my own. Once the book enters the public world, of course, then I have to consider the fact, well, probably not everybody has the same curiosity and interest and desire to understand that I do. And you hope the Kid is sympathetic. And, you know, he’s funny. He’s honest. He’s basically honest and decent, and he wants to be a good person—and is trying very hard. He’s also ashamed and guilty. And a good deal of his effort in the earlier parts of the book is to try to separate out shame and guilt, because he’s internalized society’s view of him as someone who is beneath any kind of civil or personal consideration.

AMYGOODMAN: I wanted to go back to one of your earlier books that was made into a film, The Sweet Hereafter. The novel tells the story of the impact on a small town of a tragic school bus accident that killed many of the town’s children. In this scene, the father of two of the children confronts an aggressive trial lawyer, who’s shown up in town to organize the families of the victims into a lawsuit. The confrontation is interrupted by a call from the lawyer’s adult daughter, a homeless drug addict.

MITCHELLSTEVENS: I can help you.

BILLYHANSEL: Not unless you can raise the dead.

MITCHELLSTEVENS: Here. You may change your mind.

BILLYHANSEL: Mitchell Stevens, Esquire. Tell me, would you be likely to sue me if I was to beat you right now? I mean, beat you so bad you [bleep] couldn’t walk for a month, because that’s what I’m about to do.

MITCHELLSTEVENS: No, Mr. Hansel, I wouldn’t sue you.

BILLYHANSEL: You leave us alone, Stevens. You leave the people of this town alone. You can’t help.

MITCHELLSTEVENS: You can help each other. Several people in the town have agreed to let me represent them in a negligence suit. Now, your case as an individual will be stronger if I’m allowed to represent you together as a group.

BILLYHANSEL: Case?

MITCHELLSTEVENS: The workers have agreed. The owners have agreed. Nicole Burnell’s parents. It’s important that we initiate proceedings right away. Things get covered up. People lie. That’s why we must begin our investigation quickly, before the evidence disappears. That’s what I’m doing out here.

BILLYHANSEL: Listen. I know Risa and Wendell Walker. They wouldn’t hire a [bleep] lawyer. The Ottos, they wouldn’t deal with you. We’re not country bumpkins you can put the big city hustle on.

MITCHELLSTEVENS: You’re angry, Mr. Hansel. And you owe it to yourself to feel that way. All I’m saying is, let me direct your rage. [phone rings] That’s my daughter. Or it may be the police to tell me they found her dead. She’s a drug addict.

AMYGOODMAN: Russell Banks, in your novel The Sweet Hereafter, as in your latest novel, Lost Memory of Skin, you write about lost childhood. Can you talk about this recurrent theme in your writing?

RUSSELLBANKS: You’re right. It does. It comes again. Rule of the Bone is really about that. And I’m not sure. I think I’m drawn to, again and again, the story of lost child. The abandoned child may be more the case. The child is not simply lost from home; there is no home in most of these cases. Perhaps, I endured a version of that, myself, as a child. But it’s—

AMYGOODMAN: Where did you grow up?

RUSSELLBANKS: In New Hampshire and eastern Massachusetts, in a broken family. My father abandoned the family when I was about 12, and I was the oldest of four. My mother raised us from there. But I think, more recently—I mean, in recent years, more—since I’m well along in adulthood, I’ve become increasingly aware of something that’s species deep, it seems to me, having been abandoned. And that’s the need to protect the weakest among us, who are always children, the most vulnerable among us. And in the last half-century—I’m old enough so I can remember the last half-century pretty well—there seems to have been a shift away from that impulse, where we’ve given it up somehow, or we’ve been seduced away from that responsibility now over several generations.

You know all those old jokes about keeping a salesman out of the—out of the house, you know, where you slam the door on his foot, and he comes in over the transom; you close the transom, he comes through the window; you close the window. They’re describing a deep impulse, which is to protect the children against the amoral forces of nature—maybe the climate, the saber-toothed tiger and the tribe over the hill. Well, the amoral forces of nature now really are the consumer economy. And when we allow the salesman to come through the door and sit down in the living room, we’ve abandoned that responsibility to protect the home from that force of nature. And then when we take the salesman in and put it in the bedroom and make it a babysitter for the kids, we’ve really turned the kids over to the salesman and to the consumer economy. And that phenomenon, to me, is a powerfully—it’s a very important and altering phenomenon, one that has taken place gradually, slowly, over several generations. And I think that the abandoned children, the lost children, in some way reflect all that.

AMYGOODMAN: As George Gerbner, the founder of the Cultural Environment Movement, said—he was the former dean of the Annenberg School of Communications—about corporations and children, we have turned our children over to corporations who have "nothing to tell and everything to sell that are raising our children today."

RUSSELLBANKS: That’s right. That’s right, exactly. Yeah, and it’s brilliant for marketing purposes, because children replace themselves. You know, you sell one group of kids, one group of 11-year-olds sneakers, and then next year there’s a whole new bunch of 11-year-olds who need sneakers, and you just keep on moving.

AMYGOODMAN: Novelist Russell Banks, author of The Sweet Hereafter. His new book is Lost Memory of Skin. We’ll come back to our interview with him in 30 seconds.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: We return to my interview with the highly acclaimed novelist, the two-time Pulitzer finalist, Russell Banks. I asked him about his historical novel Cloudsplitter, about the abolitionist John Brown.

RUSSELLBANKS: Well, where do we start? It took me 950 or 970 pages to get a novel that tried to encompass his life.

AMYGOODMAN:Cloudsplitter, why is it called that?

RUSSELLBANKS: Well, he broke through the clouds, in a way. It was the name of a mountain in the Adirondacks where he had a farm, and he’s buried just down the road from my house, in fact, along with 13 of the other men who were killed at Harpers Ferry, or executed afterwards.

AMYGOODMAN: And that was in the year...?

RUSSELLBANKS: 1859. And in October, as is mostly well known, I mean, in 1859, he went into Harpers Ferry for the—

AMYGOODMAN: Assume no history is well known.

RUSSELLBANKS: That’s true, I suppose.

AMYGOODMAN: As it all goes down the memory hole.

RUSSELLBANKS: Right, right. But Brown sort of stood at that crossroads of religion and violence in American—the American imagination, and righteous wrath, if you will, or principled violence. And he was our homegrown terrorist, but he was a terrorist for a cause that certainly today we’re universally in support of, which is the ending of slavery. And so, his story is still a very complicated one for most Americans. And even to today, he’s regarded by most African Americans as a heroic figure of the first order—among whites, placed even above Abraham Lincoln. I mean, Malcolm X and James Baldwin and W.E.B. Du Bois saw him that way. And among whites, generally, most whites, Americans, view him as a madman—well-intended madman. But nobody disagrees about the facts. The facts have been known since the day of the raid, since, you know, the time the events occurred. But it’s an amazing kind of opposite views of regarding the meaning of the facts. And so, that’s what drew me to Brown’s story, more than probably anything else. It was written well before 9/11, but it does, in a way, deal with the question of terrorism. And what—you know, because he was clearly a terrorist, quite a conscious and deliberate terrorist. He was killing some people in order to strike fear in the heart of many others.

AMYGOODMAN: I wanted to turn to your sense of place in your writing. We recently interviewed Professor Michael Zweig, who did this thorough study of the soldiers who have died in Afghanistan, at the count at the end of 2010, something—more than 1,400. He found the highest casualty rate across the country occurs among white soldiers from rural counties in upstate New York.

RUSSELLBANKS: Mm-hmm.

AMYGOODMAN: Can you talk about the hard life and characters from the north country.

RUSSELLBANKS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, in the town square where I live in upstate, in the Adirondacks, there’s a—I won’t call it quite a shrine, but there’s a memorial to all the townsmen who have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they keep on adding a new name every few months. And everybody knows those people there, their families. It’s a small town. You know these kids, you know. They’ve seen them go up through school and everything.

AMYGOODMAN: What town is that?

RUSSELLBANKS: Keene, New York. And you know their parents. You know their grandparents and so forth. They’re mostly working-class, I think. They’re not impoverished. They’re not lost, and so on. And they tend to view the military both as a patriotic opportunity, opportunity to express their patriotism and citizenship, on the one hand, but also a way perhaps to get education, formal education, higher education, because they’re moving in that direction, and they want to enter the middle class. They’re all white. The region is all white. And their parents and families are, by and large, extremely patriotic and vote Republican, and support—supported the policies of George W. Bush right down the line and are critical of the policies of Barack Obama right down the line. Go figure. They—

AMYGOODMAN: Even though Afghanistan is now Obama’s war.

RUSSELLBANKS: Yeah, yeah. And their kids are dying in it, and so on, and are—I mean, beyond that, it’s hard to say. But I think it’s important to note that these are—they’re white and that they’re striving people, strivers, trying to enter the middle class from the blue collar, from working class.

AMYGOODMAN: You’ve written fiction. That’s what you’re known for, your novels. You’ve written nonfiction, collections of short stories.

RUSSELLBANKS: Mm-hmm.

AMYGOODMAN: Talk about the difference and what you prefer.

RUSSELLBANKS: Also written screenplays, too. Well, I think I’m happiest writing fiction, and in particular, novels. Novels seem to create, for me—or allow the possibility of creating for me—an alternative universe, that’s comprehensive and large enough to let me think in ways I can’t think otherwise. The tradition of the novel and, I think, the rigor and the discipline of the art force me to be smarter than I am any other time and force me to be more honest than I am at any other time and force me to be more attentive than I am at any other time. So in some ways, a novel allows me to be better than I am the rest of the time in my life, and I think that’s why I prefer to work in that large fictional form.

AMYGOODMAN: And when you write the screenplay for your film — there was Affliction, there was The Sweet Hereafter — did you—

RUSSELLBANKS: I’m doing also Rule of the Bone and The Darling, as well, yeah.

AMYGOODMAN: So you’re controlling a lot of—

RUSSELLBANKS: The person—whoever writes the check out ends up controlling it, yeah, yeah.

AMYGOODMAN: What’s it like, these figures in your head become real on the screen? What is that like for you?

RUSSELLBANKS: Yeah.

AMYGOODMAN: And where are novels going these days? Is it all either movies, or it doesn’t happen?

RUSSELLBANKS: No, I think the novel is not being threatened by film, I don’t think, or by visual media. I think what the novel does and what films do, they’re basically delivery systems for story. And the species will always require story. And they’re different, radically different, types of delivery system. Different type of story gets delivered in film than gets delivered in the novel. But I’m not too worried about either one taking over or dominating the other, because we, as human beings, need the form of story that comes in a novel. It’s interactive. We help create the story as we read it. And we also need and relish the form of story that gets delivered by film, where we’re a passive observer and not an active participant, as well. But story is what tells us, finally, what it is to be human beings. And we need to know. I mean, there’s no other way as a species we can know what it is to be ourself. And we’re the only species for whom that’s true.

AMYGOODMAN: Finally, what do you attribute your need to, your desire for, expressing yourself through writing. You describe coming from a broken home, your dad leaving when you were 12.

RUSSELLBANKS: Mm-hmm.

AMYGOODMAN: What contributes to—and would you say it’s something you need to do?

RUSSELLBANKS: Well, I do. I think there are several sources for it, and it’s only—there are probably a lot of sources I don’t even know about or aren’t even aware of. I know that as a kid in a broken home that was marred by alcoholism and violence and so forth, storytelling was a way, just within the circle of the family, for me and my brothers and so on, and for myself, to save ourselves. We could make sense of an otherwise incoherent life for children. And then, as I grew older, it continued to function that way. As my world expanded beyond the family and out into the larger world, storytelling still was a way for me to make sense of an otherwise incoherent reality.

AMYGOODMAN: Novelist Russell Banks, author of Cloudsplitter, The Darling, Affliction, Rule of the Bone, The Sweet Hereafter. His newest is Lost Memory of Skin.

Coming up, Alaa Abd El Fattah, the prominent Egyptian blogger and activist. He has just been released from two months in military detention. His wife gave birth to their first child while he was in jail. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.

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Wed, 28 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500America’s Longest War: New Study Examines Demographics of U.S. Casualties in Afghanistanhttp://www.democracynow.org/2011/10/10/americas_longest_war_new_study_examines
tag:democracynow.org,2011-10-10:en/story/b5f31b AMY GOODMAN : Nearly 1,800 U.S. military members have been killed in Afghanistan since the war began 10 years ago, the longest war in U.S. history. We turn now to a new report . It&#8217;s called &quot;American Military Deaths in Afghanistan, and the Communities from which These Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines Came.&quot; The study is based on information drawn from obituaries and tribute pages for more than 1,400 U.S. military casualties since the war began in October 2001 &#8217;til December 2010.
We&#8217;re joined by the study&#8217;s lead author here in New York, Michael Zweig, professor of economics and director of the Center for the Study of Working Class Life at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. He wrote and directed the film Why Are We in Afghanistan?
Michael Zweig, welcome to Democracy Now!
MICHAEL ZWEIG : Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN : You&#8217;re revealing this in the media for the first time. Lay out what you&#8217;ve found and what you&#8217;ve been most surprised by.
MICHAEL ZWEIG : Well, we looked at all these casualties and tried to understand who the people were and tried to get past the stereotypes and the sort of conventional wisdom, and then also we know what cities and towns they come from, so we looked at their communities, going through census data and other information.
So, what we found was that the casualties there are—of course, they&#8217;re young, but they are mostly with a high school education. They don&#8217;t have more than a high school education. And they are overwhelmingly white. They&#8217;re not disproportionately black and Hispanic, which a lot of people think. They&#8217;re disproportionately white.
They are not from rural areas and small towns; they&#8217;re from big cities and cities greater than 50,000 in this country. More than three-quarters come from those big cities. Now, of course, most people live in the big cities, so that there is a disproportional representation from rural areas and small towns. But really, most of the dead come from big cities and the suburban areas.
What we found was also that most of the people who are dying are not the poor. They don&#8217;t come from poor communities. They come from communities that are solidly working-class communities, that are—whose incomes in the communities are a little bit less than the median, so maybe $40,000. Forty-five thousand dollars a year is the median income in these counties. So, we look at the jobs, the occupations that the soldiers and sailors had, and also their parents, where we have that information. In the United States, about 62 percent of the population are in the working class. But of the casualties, it&#8217;s 78 percent who are working-class people. And their mothers, it&#8217;s about 75 percent, and the fathers, 73 percent, working class. So, we&#8217;re really talking about a fighting force and a dying force that&#8217;s overwhelmingly working class, much more so than the country as a whole.
AMY GOODMAN : Women?
MICHAEL ZWEIG : Well, there are not that many women who have died. Of the 1,446 that we counted from the start of the war to the end of 2010, there were 23 women. It was not enough, really, to make much of a comparison. But what was striking was that the women were almost three times as likely to have a college education as the men, and they were almost five times as likely—the women were almost five times as likely to be graduates of West Point and other—the other military academies. So that is something that is quite suggestive, that the women who are there dying are disproportionately from those academies.
AMY GOODMAN : And, of course, women are not allowed to engage directly in combat, technically—
MICHAEL ZWEIG : Yeah, technically, but—
AMY GOODMAN : —which is why there are fewer in number.
MICHAEL ZWEIG : Well, that&#8217;s right. Well, there&#8217;s a whole series of steps that go from being home and graduating from high school and dying on the battlefield. You have to be recruited. Then you have to get through basic training—that&#8217;s another filter. Then you have to be deployed to Afghanistan. And then you have to be deployed into combat zones. So, there are different filters there that we did not look into, but we just looked at the final results.
AMY GOODMAN : On this Columbus Day, Native American deaths?
MICHAEL ZWEIG : Well, the Native American deaths are a little bit less than one percent of the total. But the Native American population is a little bit less than one percent. So the population is about equally represented, maybe a little bit more represented among the casualties. But what&#8217;s really striking is that whites are way disproportionately represented in the casualties, and blacks and Hispanics underrepresented.
AMY GOODMAN : And the area of the country that they come from?
MICHAEL ZWEIG : Well, here again, often we hear they come from rural areas where there&#8217;s no real economic opportunity. It turns out to be not quite so true. As I said a minute ago, over three-quarters come from cities that have more than 50,000 people. Almost half come from cities and the suburban areas with more than a million people. The city that has the biggest casualty loss is Los Angeles—or the county, Los Angeles County, with 28. We looked at five different kinds of counties. We looked at the core, urban, major metropolitan area counties, and then their suburban ring. And then we looked at counties which have cities or around cities of less than a million but more than 50,000. And those three together count for 77 percent of all the casualties.
Now, the number of casualties is different from the casualty rates. So you can have one person die in a county in Texas with 585 people, and you have an enormous casualty rate. But that&#8217;s because there are not many people who live in that county, so one or two people who die is a big hit. In Los Angeles, the casualty rate is about two-and-a-half persons per million in the period that we&#8217;re looking at. The biggest casualty rates are actually in rural areas in the Northeast, in Maine and in upstate New York.
AMY GOODMAN : Now, it&#8217;s not as if you interviewed families—
MICHAEL ZWEIG : Right, we did not.
AMY GOODMAN : —but in terms of why people go to war, what you could gather from the tributes—
MICHAEL ZWEIG : Right.
AMY GOODMAN : —from the newspaper articles? Though it&#8217;s sort of hard when someone dies, because there&#8217;s one thing that is emphasized, whether or not the person feels this way, and that is about issues of going to war to fight for your country.
MICHAEL ZWEIG : Right, and patriotism. And we did look for reasons that were given in these obituaries and tribute pages. And there were a lot of reasons that were given, actually, and including a lot of people who talked about economic motives—the person needed a job, the person was looking for skill training, the person was looking for a way out of the community.
AMY GOODMAN : I mean, you wouldn&#8217;t write that in tributes.
MICHAEL ZWEIG : Well, you wouldn&#8217;t, but people did, you know. And actually, what we found was that about three-quarters of the tribute pages included some kind of reference to a patriotic motive—serving the country, coming from a military tradition in the family. And about 43 percent cited some kind of economic motive, like looking for a job or some other kind of economic reason for joining. So, there may be something to the so-called economic draft, but it doesn&#8217;t seem like it&#8217;s as big a deal as it is sometimes held. And that was—corresponded with what we found about the counties from which these men and women came. They come from counties where the unemployment rate and the poverty rate are no greater than, and often less than, the national average or other counties of that type. So it doesn&#8217;t seem to be that these young men and women are coming out of communities for which there is no opportunity. It seems that there is opportunity as much as anywhere else in the country, and while there may be some economic motivation, I think that we&#8217;re making a mistake if we think that all the people who are there are people of color who have no economic opportunity or poor whites who have no way out, and so they&#8217;re kind of dragooned by their economic circumstances into the military. I think that it&#8217;s important to really understand who the people actually are, so that we can build a political arrangement and we can talk to them and talk to their families on a basis of their realistic existence.
And I think it&#8217;s also important to respect and understand who&#8217;s actually doing the work. You know, we sometimes say, &quot;Oh, we put in a new kitchen last year.&quot; No, I didn&#8217;t put in a new kitchen; I hired somebody to put in a new kitchen. And we often sloppy-talk about how, well, we&#8217;re fighting a war in Afghanistan. Well, we&#8217;re not fighting a war; we hired some people to go do that. And it&#8217;s time that we pay a little bit more attention to the people who are actually doing the work, as opposed to the people who are running the show and sending them off to die. Although those people need to have plenty of attention focused on them, I think that it&#8217;s clear that we really do need to know more about who is doing the work. And that&#8217;s what our Center for Study of Working Class Life is all about.
AMY GOODMAN : Michael Zweig, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Michael Zweig is a professor of economics and director of the Center for Study of Working Class Life at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, lead author of this new report that we will link to called &quot;American Military Deaths in Afghanistan, and the Communities from which These Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines Came.&quot; AMYGOODMAN: Nearly 1,800 U.S. military members have been killed in Afghanistan since the war began 10 years ago, the longest war in U.S. history. We turn now to a new report. It’s called "American Military Deaths in Afghanistan, and the Communities from which These Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines Came." The study is based on information drawn from obituaries and tribute pages for more than 1,400 U.S. military casualties since the war began in October 2001 ’til December 2010.

We’re joined by the study’s lead author here in New York, Michael Zweig, professor of economics and director of the Center for the Study of Working Class Life at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. He wrote and directed the film Why Are We in Afghanistan?

Michael Zweig, welcome to Democracy Now!

MICHAELZWEIG: Thank you.

AMYGOODMAN: You’re revealing this in the media for the first time. Lay out what you’ve found and what you’ve been most surprised by.

MICHAELZWEIG: Well, we looked at all these casualties and tried to understand who the people were and tried to get past the stereotypes and the sort of conventional wisdom, and then also we know what cities and towns they come from, so we looked at their communities, going through census data and other information.

So, what we found was that the casualties there are—of course, they’re young, but they are mostly with a high school education. They don’t have more than a high school education. And they are overwhelmingly white. They’re not disproportionately black and Hispanic, which a lot of people think. They’re disproportionately white.

They are not from rural areas and small towns; they’re from big cities and cities greater than 50,000 in this country. More than three-quarters come from those big cities. Now, of course, most people live in the big cities, so that there is a disproportional representation from rural areas and small towns. But really, most of the dead come from big cities and the suburban areas.

What we found was also that most of the people who are dying are not the poor. They don’t come from poor communities. They come from communities that are solidly working-class communities, that are—whose incomes in the communities are a little bit less than the median, so maybe $40,000. Forty-five thousand dollars a year is the median income in these counties. So, we look at the jobs, the occupations that the soldiers and sailors had, and also their parents, where we have that information. In the United States, about 62 percent of the population are in the working class. But of the casualties, it’s 78 percent who are working-class people. And their mothers, it’s about 75 percent, and the fathers, 73 percent, working class. So, we’re really talking about a fighting force and a dying force that’s overwhelmingly working class, much more so than the country as a whole.

AMYGOODMAN: Women?

MICHAELZWEIG: Well, there are not that many women who have died. Of the 1,446 that we counted from the start of the war to the end of 2010, there were 23 women. It was not enough, really, to make much of a comparison. But what was striking was that the women were almost three times as likely to have a college education as the men, and they were almost five times as likely—the women were almost five times as likely to be graduates of West Point and other—the other military academies. So that is something that is quite suggestive, that the women who are there dying are disproportionately from those academies.

AMYGOODMAN: And, of course, women are not allowed to engage directly in combat, technically—

MICHAELZWEIG: Yeah, technically, but—

AMYGOODMAN: —which is why there are fewer in number.

MICHAELZWEIG: Well, that’s right. Well, there’s a whole series of steps that go from being home and graduating from high school and dying on the battlefield. You have to be recruited. Then you have to get through basic training—that’s another filter. Then you have to be deployed to Afghanistan. And then you have to be deployed into combat zones. So, there are different filters there that we did not look into, but we just looked at the final results.

AMYGOODMAN: On this Columbus Day, Native American deaths?

MICHAELZWEIG: Well, the Native American deaths are a little bit less than one percent of the total. But the Native American population is a little bit less than one percent. So the population is about equally represented, maybe a little bit more represented among the casualties. But what’s really striking is that whites are way disproportionately represented in the casualties, and blacks and Hispanics underrepresented.

AMYGOODMAN: And the area of the country that they come from?

MICHAELZWEIG: Well, here again, often we hear they come from rural areas where there’s no real economic opportunity. It turns out to be not quite so true. As I said a minute ago, over three-quarters come from cities that have more than 50,000 people. Almost half come from cities and the suburban areas with more than a million people. The city that has the biggest casualty loss is Los Angeles—or the county, Los Angeles County, with 28. We looked at five different kinds of counties. We looked at the core, urban, major metropolitan area counties, and then their suburban ring. And then we looked at counties which have cities or around cities of less than a million but more than 50,000. And those three together count for 77 percent of all the casualties.

Now, the number of casualties is different from the casualty rates. So you can have one person die in a county in Texas with 585 people, and you have an enormous casualty rate. But that’s because there are not many people who live in that county, so one or two people who die is a big hit. In Los Angeles, the casualty rate is about two-and-a-half persons per million in the period that we’re looking at. The biggest casualty rates are actually in rural areas in the Northeast, in Maine and in upstate New York.

AMYGOODMAN: Now, it’s not as if you interviewed families—

MICHAELZWEIG: Right, we did not.

AMYGOODMAN: —but in terms of why people go to war, what you could gather from the tributes—

MICHAELZWEIG: Right.

AMYGOODMAN: —from the newspaper articles? Though it’s sort of hard when someone dies, because there’s one thing that is emphasized, whether or not the person feels this way, and that is about issues of going to war to fight for your country.

MICHAELZWEIG: Right, and patriotism. And we did look for reasons that were given in these obituaries and tribute pages. And there were a lot of reasons that were given, actually, and including a lot of people who talked about economic motives—the person needed a job, the person was looking for skill training, the person was looking for a way out of the community.

AMYGOODMAN: I mean, you wouldn’t write that in tributes.

MICHAELZWEIG: Well, you wouldn’t, but people did, you know. And actually, what we found was that about three-quarters of the tribute pages included some kind of reference to a patriotic motive—serving the country, coming from a military tradition in the family. And about 43 percent cited some kind of economic motive, like looking for a job or some other kind of economic reason for joining. So, there may be something to the so-called economic draft, but it doesn’t seem like it’s as big a deal as it is sometimes held. And that was—corresponded with what we found about the counties from which these men and women came. They come from counties where the unemployment rate and the poverty rate are no greater than, and often less than, the national average or other counties of that type. So it doesn’t seem to be that these young men and women are coming out of communities for which there is no opportunity. It seems that there is opportunity as much as anywhere else in the country, and while there may be some economic motivation, I think that we’re making a mistake if we think that all the people who are there are people of color who have no economic opportunity or poor whites who have no way out, and so they’re kind of dragooned by their economic circumstances into the military. I think that it’s important to really understand who the people actually are, so that we can build a political arrangement and we can talk to them and talk to their families on a basis of their realistic existence.

And I think it’s also important to respect and understand who’s actually doing the work. You know, we sometimes say, "Oh, we put in a new kitchen last year." No, I didn’t put in a new kitchen; I hired somebody to put in a new kitchen. And we often sloppy-talk about how, well, we’re fighting a war in Afghanistan. Well, we’re not fighting a war; we hired some people to go do that. And it’s time that we pay a little bit more attention to the people who are actually doing the work, as opposed to the people who are running the show and sending them off to die. Although those people need to have plenty of attention focused on them, I think that it’s clear that we really do need to know more about who is doing the work. And that’s what our Center for Study of Working Class Life is all about.

AMYGOODMAN: Michael Zweig, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Michael Zweig is a professor of economics and director of the Center for Study of Working Class Life at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, lead author of this new report that we will link to called "American Military Deaths in Afghanistan, and the Communities from which These Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines Came."

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Mon, 10 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400Obama Jobs Plan Bolder than Expected, But Is It Enough?http://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/9/obama_jobs_plan_bolder_than_expected
tag:democracynow.org,2011-09-09:en/story/e37d8b JUAN GONZALEZ : Before a joint session of Congress, President Obama laid out a $447 billion package of tax cuts and new government spending Thursday night to help stimulate the economy and create new jobs. The President&#8217;s speech comes at a time when 14 million people are unemployed and another 8.8 million are working part-time but seeking full-time work. The official unemployment rate stands at 9.1 percent, and the White House is predicting the rate will not fall below six percent until possibly 2017. The job crisis is particularly severe for African Americans. The black unemployment rate soared to 16.7 percent in August, the highest it&#8217;s been since 1984.
On Thursday night, Obama urged Congress to quickly pass the jobs package.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : The purpose of the American Jobs Act is simple: to put more people back to work and more money in the pockets of those who are working. It will create more jobs for construction workers, more jobs for teachers, more jobs for veterans, and more jobs for long-term unemployed. It will provide—it will provide a tax break for companies who hire new workers, and it will cut payroll taxes in half for every working American and every small business. It will provide a jolt to an economy that has stalled and give companies confidence that if they invest and if they hire, there will be customers for their products and services. You should pass this jobs plan right away.
AMY GOODMAN : President Obama proposed extending unemployment insurance at a cost of $49 billion, modernizing schools for $30 billion, and investing in transportation infrastructure projects for $50 billion. But the bulk of his proposal was made up of $240 billion in tax relief by cutting payroll taxes for employees in half next year and trimming employer payroll taxes, as well.
Obama also called on fellow Democrats to support cuts to Medicare, an initiative backed by many Republican lawmakers.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : Now, I realize there are some in my party who don’t think we should make any changes, at all, to Medicare and Medicaid, and I understand their concerns. But here&#8217;s the truth. Millions of Americans rely on Medicare in their retirement. And millions more will do so in the future. They pay for this benefit during their working years. They earn it. But with an aging population and rising healthcare costs, we are spending too fast to sustain the program. And if we don’t gradually reform the system, while protecting current beneficiaries, it won’t be there when future retirees need it. We have to reform Medicare to strengthen it.
AMY GOODMAN : Moments later, Obama said tax increases on the wealthy must also be considered.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : I&#8217;m also well aware that there are many Republicans who don&#8217;t believe we should raise taxes on those who are most fortunate and can best afford it. But here is what every American knows. While most people in this country struggle to make ends meet, a few of the most affluent citizens and most profitable corporations enjoy tax breaks and loopholes that nobody else gets. Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary—an outrage he has asked us to fix. We need a tax code where everyone gets a fair shake and where everybody pays their fair share. And by the way, I believe the vast majority of wealthy Americans and CEOs are willing to do just that, if it helps the economy grow and gets our fiscal house in order.
JUAN GONZALEZ : President Obama also reiterated his call for Congress to approve three controversial so-called free trade agreements.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : Now it&#8217;s time to clear the way for a series of trade agreements that would make it easier for American companies to sell their products in Panama, in Colombia and South Korea, while also helping the workers whose jobs have been affected by global competition. If Americans can buy Kias and Hyundais, I want to see folks in South Korea driving Fords and Chevys and Chryslers. I want to see more products sold around the world stamped with the three proud words: &quot;Made in America.&quot; That&#8217;s what we need to get done.
AMY GOODMAN : To talk more about President Obama&#8217;s speech and the job crisis, we&#8217;re joined by two people. Dedrick Muhammad, senior director for economic programs for the NAACP , is joining us from the studios of Maryland Public Television just outside Baltimore. And in Washington, D.C., Scott Paul is with us, founding executive director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Dedrick Muhammad, the unemployment rate is at record highs and has, to say the least, been a massive problem, especially in the African-American community: 17 percent unemployment, 19 percent for African-American men, in the 40 percent range for young African-American men. Do you think President Obama&#8217;s plan goes far enough?
DEDRICK MUHAMMAD : President Obama&#8217;s plan doesn&#8217;t go far enough to address that issue—I mean that issue of the racial-economic inequality, how African Americans have had twice the unemployment rate of white Americans for the last 40 years. I don&#8217;t think President Obama was even focused on addressing that piece. But I will say that President Obama&#8217;s plan was bolder than I thought it would be, was investing more than I thought it would in average Americans, and I think is a step in the right direction but has to be followed by some other steps.
JUAN GONZALEZ : Well, Scott Paul is the founding director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing. Your response to the President&#8217;s proposal and the likelihood of any aspects of his plan actually being passed?
SCOTT PAUL : Well, Juan, I think that&#8217;s the real question. And I think the President said, &quot;Pass this bill,&quot; at least 12 times, if not more. And that&#8217;s my concern, is that I—this plan is bolder than I thought it would be. It&#8217;s not the way I think some progressives would have constructed it. But I actually think if you look at the assistance that&#8217;s provided for middle-class workers, for the working poor, in forms of tax cuts, and also for the investments in our schools and our infrastructure, it actually provides more bang for the buck in the short term than the original Recovery Act did back in 2009.
The question of whether the Republican House is going to pass any of this is entirely different, and I think that&#8217;s why the President&#8217;s out there for the next couple of weeks, going into the country and saying, &quot;We need to focus on our economy now.&quot; And we know that voters of all stripes—Democrats, Republicans, independents—vastly favor getting our economy on back, creating jobs over deficit reduction, and so I hope this enthusiasm for a jobs plan continues, and I do hope that it&#8217;s not overwhelmed when the President announces his long-term deficit reduction plan over the next couple of weeks, that that becomes the focus. I think the focus needs to stay on jobs, both from an economic imperative and also from a political imperative.
JUAN GONZALEZ : Well, but the bulk of the plan is on—in terms of reduction of the payroll tax, and it&#8217;s not quite clear in the coverage of this that the President is actually talking about reducing the share that both workers and employers contribute to the Social Security tax. In essence, isn&#8217;t this borrowing from what should be the Social Security fund to be able to stimulate the economy at this point and possibly creating future problems down the road for Social Security?
SCOTT PAUL : No question about it, and that is a concern. But I think the hope is that if we get the unemployment rate down, we get more people working, we&#8217;re able to replenish that fund. I mean, I think the payroll tax cut has some merit. It&#8217;s not the, from my perspective, the most important part of his plan. I think the investment in school construction and infrastructure will have much more of an impact. I also have to say that the idea of targeting some tax assistance towards hiring unemployed veterans who are returning and also the long-term unemployed and ending discrimination against them are critically important. That&#8217;s something that obviously has been missing the last couple of years. That addresses vulnerable populations. And those aspects of the plan, I hope, are pushed forward aggressively.
AMY GOODMAN : And talking about passing all the trade deals?
SCOTT PAUL : Well, I think that&#8217;s a problem. And the idea that any of these free trade deals are going to create jobs in the short term or the long term, they would have to defy history in order to do that. Most of the free trade agreement arrangements we&#8217;ve entered into have been failures. I don&#8217;t see any reason to believe that things would change with Korea, Colombia or with Panama. I think that if the administration wants to focus on trade, an area where they could do that would be addressing some of China&#8217;s mercantilism, balancing that trade relationship. We run a $26, $27 billion monthly trade deficit with China. And to be honest, that&#8217;s where our manufacturing jobs are going. If there&#8217;s a trade focus from the White House, I wish it were on that, rather than on these free trade deals, which will have, at best, pretty much a wash for workers. It will benefit some, it will devastate some others. But it&#8217;s not going to be any sort of measure that will reduce the unemployment rate or get our economy back on track. I think it&#8217;s actually a pretty wasted effort at this point, and I&#8217;m sorry to see that they&#8217;re pushing them so hard.
JUAN GONZALEZ : And Dedrick Muhammad, what would you have preferred to see in terms of the President&#8217;s proposals, especially given the higher unemployment rate, especially among African Americans, also among Latino Americans, and also in terms of low-wage workers?
DEDRICK MUHAMMAD : Yeah, well, first, we&#8217;ll say that one thing I&#8217;m glad that is part of his proposal is something that NAACP , through our president, Benjamin Todd Jealous, has been talking to the President about, about putting aside money and this $4,000 tax credit to help those who have been long-term unemployed, because we really do see that as a growing crisis, where people in a recession, looks like, could be permanently dislocated from the job market. I think—as I said previously, I think this is a step of dealing with some of the immediate impacts of the recession. I think that&#8217;s why there was so much money put into the payroll tax cut, because that&#8217;s the quickest way to get some money as a brief stimulus.
But I think, long term, there is a long-term problem. Like, we&#8217;re not just trying to pull out of the Great Recession. We&#8217;re really pulling out of a great, let&#8217;s say, retraction of the middle class for the last, arguably, 30 years. And there&#8217;s going to have to be follow-up steps. And it can&#8217;t just be—I think people thought the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, that&#8217;s going to solve everything. I hope people don&#8217;t believe that the American Jobs Act is going to solve anything. We&#8217;ve been going in the wrong direction 30 years, concentrating wealth at the highest. We need to have a great—at least 10 years of focused, progressive policy, that hopefully, for the first time, can create a robust middle class that&#8217;s inclusive of all Americans.
AMY GOODMAN : Dedrick Muhammad, we want to thank you for being with us, of the NAACP . Scott Paul, Alliance for American Manufacturing, is staying with us, as we turn our focus to the World Trade Center, the new World Trade Center, what&#8217;s going up downtown Manhattan at Ground Zero, and relate it to President Obama&#8217;s speech around jobs. We&#8217;ll look at its tenants. We&#8217;ll look at the cost of the World Trade Center and the materials being used to build that World Trade Center—steel from Germany, the glass from China. Stay with us. JUANGONZALEZ: Before a joint session of Congress, President Obama laid out a $447 billion package of tax cuts and new government spending Thursday night to help stimulate the economy and create new jobs. The President’s speech comes at a time when 14 million people are unemployed and another 8.8 million are working part-time but seeking full-time work. The official unemployment rate stands at 9.1 percent, and the White House is predicting the rate will not fall below six percent until possibly 2017. The job crisis is particularly severe for African Americans. The black unemployment rate soared to 16.7 percent in August, the highest it’s been since 1984.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: The purpose of the American Jobs Act is simple: to put more people back to work and more money in the pockets of those who are working. It will create more jobs for construction workers, more jobs for teachers, more jobs for veterans, and more jobs for long-term unemployed. It will provide—it will provide a tax break for companies who hire new workers, and it will cut payroll taxes in half for every working American and every small business. It will provide a jolt to an economy that has stalled and give companies confidence that if they invest and if they hire, there will be customers for their products and services. You should pass this jobs plan right away.

AMYGOODMAN: President Obama proposed extending unemployment insurance at a cost of $49 billion, modernizing schools for $30 billion, and investing in transportation infrastructure projects for $50 billion. But the bulk of his proposal was made up of $240 billion in tax relief by cutting payroll taxes for employees in half next year and trimming employer payroll taxes, as well.

Obama also called on fellow Democrats to support cuts to Medicare, an initiative backed by many Republican lawmakers.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: Now, I realize there are some in my party who don’t think we should make any changes, at all, to Medicare and Medicaid, and I understand their concerns. But here’s the truth. Millions of Americans rely on Medicare in their retirement. And millions more will do so in the future. They pay for this benefit during their working years. They earn it. But with an aging population and rising healthcare costs, we are spending too fast to sustain the program. And if we don’t gradually reform the system, while protecting current beneficiaries, it won’t be there when future retirees need it. We have to reform Medicare to strengthen it.

AMYGOODMAN: Moments later, Obama said tax increases on the wealthy must also be considered.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: I’m also well aware that there are many Republicans who don’t believe we should raise taxes on those who are most fortunate and can best afford it. But here is what every American knows. While most people in this country struggle to make ends meet, a few of the most affluent citizens and most profitable corporations enjoy tax breaks and loopholes that nobody else gets. Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary—an outrage he has asked us to fix. We need a tax code where everyone gets a fair shake and where everybody pays their fair share. And by the way, I believe the vast majority of wealthy Americans and CEOs are willing to do just that, if it helps the economy grow and gets our fiscal house in order.

JUANGONZALEZ: President Obama also reiterated his call for Congress to approve three controversial so-called free trade agreements.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: Now it’s time to clear the way for a series of trade agreements that would make it easier for American companies to sell their products in Panama, in Colombia and South Korea, while also helping the workers whose jobs have been affected by global competition. If Americans can buy Kias and Hyundais, I want to see folks in South Korea driving Fords and Chevys and Chryslers. I want to see more products sold around the world stamped with the three proud words: "Made in America." That’s what we need to get done.

AMYGOODMAN: To talk more about President Obama’s speech and the job crisis, we’re joined by two people. Dedrick Muhammad, senior director for economic programs for the NAACP, is joining us from the studios of Maryland Public Television just outside Baltimore. And in Washington, D.C., Scott Paul is with us, founding executive director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Dedrick Muhammad, the unemployment rate is at record highs and has, to say the least, been a massive problem, especially in the African-American community: 17 percent unemployment, 19 percent for African-American men, in the 40 percent range for young African-American men. Do you think President Obama’s plan goes far enough?

DEDRICKMUHAMMAD: President Obama’s plan doesn’t go far enough to address that issue—I mean that issue of the racial-economic inequality, how African Americans have had twice the unemployment rate of white Americans for the last 40 years. I don’t think President Obama was even focused on addressing that piece. But I will say that President Obama’s plan was bolder than I thought it would be, was investing more than I thought it would in average Americans, and I think is a step in the right direction but has to be followed by some other steps.

JUANGONZALEZ: Well, Scott Paul is the founding director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing. Your response to the President’s proposal and the likelihood of any aspects of his plan actually being passed?

SCOTTPAUL: Well, Juan, I think that’s the real question. And I think the President said, "Pass this bill," at least 12 times, if not more. And that’s my concern, is that I—this plan is bolder than I thought it would be. It’s not the way I think some progressives would have constructed it. But I actually think if you look at the assistance that’s provided for middle-class workers, for the working poor, in forms of tax cuts, and also for the investments in our schools and our infrastructure, it actually provides more bang for the buck in the short term than the original Recovery Act did back in 2009.

The question of whether the Republican House is going to pass any of this is entirely different, and I think that’s why the President’s out there for the next couple of weeks, going into the country and saying, "We need to focus on our economy now." And we know that voters of all stripes—Democrats, Republicans, independents—vastly favor getting our economy on back, creating jobs over deficit reduction, and so I hope this enthusiasm for a jobs plan continues, and I do hope that it’s not overwhelmed when the President announces his long-term deficit reduction plan over the next couple of weeks, that that becomes the focus. I think the focus needs to stay on jobs, both from an economic imperative and also from a political imperative.

JUANGONZALEZ: Well, but the bulk of the plan is on—in terms of reduction of the payroll tax, and it’s not quite clear in the coverage of this that the President is actually talking about reducing the share that both workers and employers contribute to the Social Security tax. In essence, isn’t this borrowing from what should be the Social Security fund to be able to stimulate the economy at this point and possibly creating future problems down the road for Social Security?

SCOTTPAUL: No question about it, and that is a concern. But I think the hope is that if we get the unemployment rate down, we get more people working, we’re able to replenish that fund. I mean, I think the payroll tax cut has some merit. It’s not the, from my perspective, the most important part of his plan. I think the investment in school construction and infrastructure will have much more of an impact. I also have to say that the idea of targeting some tax assistance towards hiring unemployed veterans who are returning and also the long-term unemployed and ending discrimination against them are critically important. That’s something that obviously has been missing the last couple of years. That addresses vulnerable populations. And those aspects of the plan, I hope, are pushed forward aggressively.

AMYGOODMAN: And talking about passing all the trade deals?

SCOTTPAUL: Well, I think that’s a problem. And the idea that any of these free trade deals are going to create jobs in the short term or the long term, they would have to defy history in order to do that. Most of the free trade agreement arrangements we’ve entered into have been failures. I don’t see any reason to believe that things would change with Korea, Colombia or with Panama. I think that if the administration wants to focus on trade, an area where they could do that would be addressing some of China’s mercantilism, balancing that trade relationship. We run a $26, $27 billion monthly trade deficit with China. And to be honest, that’s where our manufacturing jobs are going. If there’s a trade focus from the White House, I wish it were on that, rather than on these free trade deals, which will have, at best, pretty much a wash for workers. It will benefit some, it will devastate some others. But it’s not going to be any sort of measure that will reduce the unemployment rate or get our economy back on track. I think it’s actually a pretty wasted effort at this point, and I’m sorry to see that they’re pushing them so hard.

JUANGONZALEZ: And Dedrick Muhammad, what would you have preferred to see in terms of the President’s proposals, especially given the higher unemployment rate, especially among African Americans, also among Latino Americans, and also in terms of low-wage workers?

DEDRICKMUHAMMAD: Yeah, well, first, we’ll say that one thing I’m glad that is part of his proposal is something that NAACP, through our president, Benjamin Todd Jealous, has been talking to the President about, about putting aside money and this $4,000 tax credit to help those who have been long-term unemployed, because we really do see that as a growing crisis, where people in a recession, looks like, could be permanently dislocated from the job market. I think—as I said previously, I think this is a step of dealing with some of the immediate impacts of the recession. I think that’s why there was so much money put into the payroll tax cut, because that’s the quickest way to get some money as a brief stimulus.

But I think, long term, there is a long-term problem. Like, we’re not just trying to pull out of the Great Recession. We’re really pulling out of a great, let’s say, retraction of the middle class for the last, arguably, 30 years. And there’s going to have to be follow-up steps. And it can’t just be—I think people thought the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, that’s going to solve everything. I hope people don’t believe that the American Jobs Act is going to solve anything. We’ve been going in the wrong direction 30 years, concentrating wealth at the highest. We need to have a great—at least 10 years of focused, progressive policy, that hopefully, for the first time, can create a robust middle class that’s inclusive of all Americans.

AMYGOODMAN: Dedrick Muhammad, we want to thank you for being with us, of the NAACP. Scott Paul, Alliance for American Manufacturing, is staying with us, as we turn our focus to the World Trade Center, the new World Trade Center, what’s going up downtown Manhattan at Ground Zero, and relate it to President Obama’s speech around jobs. We’ll look at its tenants. We’ll look at the cost of the World Trade Center and the materials being used to build that World Trade Center—steel from Germany, the glass from China. Stay with us.

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Fri, 09 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400Verizon Workers, Management Dig in for Decisive Labor Battle 'This is no ordinary strike'http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/8/17/verizon_workers_management_dig_in_for_decisive_labor_battle_this_is_no_ordinary_strike
tag:democracynow.org,2011-08-17:blog/89c48c On the 10th day of the most important labor fight in America, striking Verizon worker Alexandra Camacho stood on a streetcorner in downtown Brooklyn and vowed to stay out as long as necessary.
&quot;They want to strip from us everything we&#8217;ve won in the past,&quot; the slender Camacho said. &quot;They even want to take away our Martin Luther King holiday. Well, that&#8217;s not gonna happen.&quot;
Hundreds of Camacho&#8217;s fellow workers from Verizon&#8217;s Brooklyn call center walked the picket line behind her in red shirts. They chanted &quot;No Contract, No Work&quot; to the rhythmic beat of cowbells and drums.
Across the Eastern seaboard, 45,000 Verizon employees have hit the streets&ndash;at a time when labor strikes were supposed to be extinct.
Company officials say the unions must face reality.
&quot;As consumers continue to cut the cord or choose competitors&#8217; wireline services, the company must make meaningful changes to its wireline cost structure,&quot; says one official Verizon response to the union.
But ask yourself: Why would so many workers risk their livelihood in the midst of a stubborn recession, with more than 9 million unemployed?
Because Verizon has left them no choice, the workers say.
This is a company, after all, that is swimming in cash.
Click to read more of Juan Gonzalez&#8217;s column in the New York Daily News
On the 10th day of the most important labor fight in America, striking Verizon worker Alexandra Camacho stood on a streetcorner in downtown Brooklyn and vowed to stay out as long as necessary.

"They want to strip from us everything we’ve won in the past," the slender Camacho said. "They even want to take away our Martin Luther King holiday. Well, that’s not gonna happen."

Hundreds of Camacho’s fellow workers from Verizon’s Brooklyn call center walked the picket line behind her in red shirts. They chanted "No Contract, No Work" to the rhythmic beat of cowbells and drums.

Across the Eastern seaboard, 45,000 Verizon employees have hit the streets–at a time when labor strikes were supposed to be extinct.

Company officials say the unions must face reality.

"As consumers continue to cut the cord or choose competitors’ wireline services, the company must make meaningful changes to its wireline cost structure," says one official Verizon response to the union.

But ask yourself: Why would so many workers risk their livelihood in the midst of a stubborn recession, with more than 9 million unemployed?

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Wed, 17 Aug 2011 14:12:00 -0400Verizon Workers Strike over "Full-Scale Attack" on Wages, Benefits at Telecom Gianthttp://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/11/verizon_workers_strike_over_full_scale
tag:democracynow.org,2011-08-11:en/story/1becd8 AMY GOODMAN : We turn now to what&#8217;s happening in the United States. If you happen to call the telecommunications company Verizon today, you may hear a message that sounds like this.
VERIZON RECORDED MESSAGE : Thanks for calling Verizon. You can now reach us at 1-800- VERIZON for all of your needs. Please be advised, due to a strike, you may experience significant delays in having your call answered. Visit us on the web at Verizon.com, or I will be glad to help you in our automated system.
AMY GOODMAN : Forty-five thousand workers at Verizon have entered their fifth day on strike in what&#8217;s been described as the nation&#8217;s largest strike in four years. The strike was called after negotiations broke down between Verizon and two unions representing the workers, Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Verizon was attempting to cut health and pension benefits for workers and make it easier for the company to fire workers. The workers on strike are employed in Verizon&#8217;s fixed-line division covering landline phones, DSL internet, FiOS cable TV and internet. Workers at Verizon Wireless are not unionized.
Verizon says the benefit cuts are needed because its wireline business has been in decline for more than a decade, as more people switch to using cell phones exclusively. But union officials have rejected Verizon&#8217;s argument. As the nation&#8217;s second-largest U.S. phone carrier, Verizon earned $6.9 billion in net income for the first six months of the year. Verizon&#8217;s outgoing CEO , Ivan Seidenberg, earned more than $18 million in total compensation in 2010, roughly $49,000 a day.
Democracy Now! &#8217;s Jaisal Noor spoke to some striking workers at a Verizon picket line in Manhattan on Wednesday.
PETER D&#8217;ESPOSITO: My name is Peter D&#8217;Esposito. I&#8217;ve been with Verizon for 32 years. We&#8217;re here today because we&#8217;re on strike against the Verizon Corporation. We&#8217;ve been negotiating a contract since June 22nd. Our contract went up Sunday at midnight. And unfortunately, all of—there&#8217;s been no movement in the contract. That&#8217;s why we&#8217;re here. Our demands are to hold on to what we worked for for the last 50 years. And what I mean by that, our medical benefits, our pensions, our job security, local issues like transfers.
KIM ARTIS : I just want everybody to know that—don&#8217;t believe everything that you hear. Verizon is a multi-billion-dollar corporation. They could afford to pay us for years to come and not feel it. This is just an example of corporate greed. And my question is, how much is enough? When is it enough?
GAIL : Well, what we&#8217;re really striking for is because we need to keep jobs in the U.S. We need to stimulate our economy. The working-class, the middle-class families are the families that are suffering. And without them, then that means that the U.S. is going to be taking a downward spiral. And what we need to realize is that this does not just affect us here at Verizon, CWA and IBEW , this affects all unions, because once one union is taken down, then they&#8217;re going to go after all the other unions.
DOMINIC RENDA : If we strike Verizon and win, it can give confidence to people throughout this country that they can also take on their bosses, whether it be a government job or whether it be in the private sector, and also win. Instead of us being brought down to where everybody else is, you know, making peanuts and having benefits you have to pay into, if benefits at all, that everybody else should learn from us, take on their employer and fight for the things that we all deserve.
AMY GOODMAN : Some of the Verizon workers who are on strike. To talk more about the strike, we&#8217;re joined by two guests. Bob Master is a spokesperson for Communications Workers of America, and Pamela Galpern is a striking Verizon worker and union activist. We did invite Verizon to join us on the program, but a company spokesperson declined our invitation.
Bob Master, lay out this strike, how significant it is in the country today.
ROBERT MASTER : Well, I think that the workers that you had on, you know, the last few minutes really explained it extremely well. This really represents everything that&#8217;s gone wrong in this country today, where the richest are trying to make the working class and the middle class pay the price of, you know, whatever is happening. And the truth of the matter is, you know, this is a corporation that made $22.5 billion over the last four years, paid its top five executives a quarter of a billion dollars, and yet they want to strip workers of retirement security, health security, employment security, cut benefits for workers who get hurt on the job, cut paid sick leave. It&#8217;s just wrong. It&#8217;s not the way we should be going.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, we did invite Verizon on the show; they declined our invitation. But on Verizon&#8217;s website, they write, &quot;Profits from Verizon&#8217;s wireline business have declined dramatically due to increased consumer demand for wireless and Internet-based communication services. Today, Verizon spends $4 billion annually on employee health care, and certain representatives of CWA&#8217;s described &#39;middle class&#39; workforce earn a total of $140,000 annually in total compensation and benefits. Faced with these realities, the company must make changes to its cost structure to remain competitive.&quot; Bob?
ROBERT MASTER : First of all, one thing people should know is that there are actually 70 technicians who work for Verizon Wireless who are actually also on strike. And in light of Verizon&#8217;s logic, we don&#8217;t see Verizon offering them gigantic raises because of all the profits they&#8217;re generating. So there&#8217;s quite a double standard.
The second thing is, is that they say that the wireline is declining, but when they talk to—
AMY GOODMAN : And explain wireline.
ROBERT MASTER : Wireline is the traditional network, which has also been transformed by a $20 billion national investment in the most advanced telecommunications technology in the world, the so-called FiOS product, which is high-speed internet and TV, which our members, like Pam, are installing and building, repairing and so forth. So we are helping to generate that profit. In the second quarter, Verizon told investors on Wall Street, &quot;Our wireline margins have increased for the last five consecutive quarters.&quot; So they cry &quot;poor&quot; when the strike begins, but when they talk to Wall Street, they talk about how well the product is doing.
AMY GOODMAN : Pam Galpern, what do you do at Verizon?
PAMELA GALPERN : I&#8217;m a field technician in construction, so I&#8217;m what&#8217;s called a splicer.
AMY GOODMAN : And why have you decided to go out on strike?
PAMELA GALPERN : Verizon has basically launched a full-scale attack on our jobs, our living standards, our wages, our benefits. As one of the other workers said, they&#8217;ve been negotiating at the negotiating table since June 22nd. They brought forward a hundred proposals that would essentially destroy—roll back 40 years of collective bargaining and destroy the good jobs that we have. And the company did not move on any of their proposals during the six weeks of bargaining. So when the contract expired, there were still a hundred proposals on the table that would essentially destroy the good jobs that Verizon workers have fought for over many years. There was a 17-week strike in 1989 over health benefits.
And we have—essentially, the company has said, &quot;Despite the fact that we&#8217;re hugely profitable, we are going to take advantage of the economic situation in the company right now to try to roll back the wages, the benefits, the job security of our workers.&quot; And it&#8217;s really corporate greed run rampant. The company is taking advantage of the current situation to try to put a tremendous level of sacrifice on the workers who build the network, who maintain the network, who do the work, who have done the work to make the company as profitable as it is.
AMY GOODMAN : How is the company working now, with all of you out on strike?
PAMELA GALPERN : Well, we have people picketing every location. We have people picketing everywhere that Verizon work is being done. I don&#8217;t think that they&#8217;re getting very much work done. We&#8217;re also picketing at the Verizon Wireless stores and asking people not to shop there. I think that they have—they have brought in managers from all over the country, but they don&#8217;t know how to do the job. We&#8217;re the ones who know how to do the job. We&#8217;re the ones who know how to build and maintain the network. And we&#8217;re the ones who really know how to keep things up and running. The company, the managers that they&#8217;ve brought in are being put in a situation they don&#8217;t know what they&#8217;re doing, and they&#8217;re also working in extremely unsafe conditions.
AMY GOODMAN : Boston Globe says, &quot;Verizon saying that service lines have been sabotaged in more than a dozen instances and that some nonunion employees have been assaulted by union members. Meanwhile, the unions [reported that] members in Amherst, N.Y., were hit by a car as a replacement worker attempted to drive through the picket line.&quot;
PAMELA GALPERN : One of the executives from Verizon Wireless, before the strike started, said, &quot;You&#8217;re going to see&quot; — said to management, &quot;You&#8217;re going to see picketers, and you&#8217;re going to feel like running them over.&quot; And I think a lot of the managers who were brought in heard that and took it as a mandate to basically have very little regard for the picketers. So there have been a number of incidents—and Bob can talk about it more—of picketers being hit by Verizon managers.
ROBERT MASTER : We have two dozen reports now confirmed of really aggressive, reckless driving by managers going through picket lines. A number of workers on the picket line have been hit. Several have gone to the hospital. So, there&#8217;s a lot of allegations by management about things that we&#8217;re doing; at the same time, there&#8217;s no taking of responsibility for the reckless behavior of a lot of the people that they&#8217;ve brought in to try to do the work that Pam and her brothers and sisters have been—you know, would have been doing under normal circumstances.
AMY GOODMAN : Why aren&#8217;t the workers, Bob, at Verizon Wireless unionized?
ROBERT MASTER : The company has been viciously anti-union. This group of technicians, these 70 technicians, organized—
AMY GOODMAN : Out of how many?
ROBERT MASTER : Oh, out of about 75,000 or 80,000 total at Verizon Wireless. This group of technicians actually joined the union when it was NYNEX Mobile during the 1989 strike. And we&#8217;ve been able to maintain that bargaining unit. But at Verizon Wireless, the company has exercised enormous amounts of fear and intimidation to try to keep the union out. And when we did have some organizing drives at a couple of call centers in Morristown, New Jersey, and in Rockland County, they closed them and moved them to South Carolina.
AMY GOODMAN : Do you get your last paycheck tomorrow, Pam?
PAMELA GALPERN : We get our last paycheck today.
AMY GOODMAN : Today?
PAMELA GALPERN : Yes.
AMY GOODMAN : So, what are you going to do?
PAMELA GALPERN : Well—
AMY GOODMAN : Does the union have strike fund set up?
PAMELA GALPERN : The union has a strike fund.
AMY GOODMAN : That&#8217;s CWA ?
PAMELA GALPERN : CWA has a strike fund. CWA has a strike fund.
AMY GOODMAN : IBEW doesn&#8217;t?
PAMELA GALPERN : IBEW does not. And I think that it&#8217;s going to be tough for people. Today is the last paycheck. I also think that workers know that our jobs and our livelihood and our future is on the line. And they know that we might have to sacrifice right now in order to lay the groundwork for our future and to have a future, to have a future with this company. And the workers that I&#8217;ve talked to are ready to make that sacrifice. We know it&#8217;s going to be tough. Financially, it&#8217;s going to be very difficult. But I think that people know that this really is a fight for our jobs and for our future and for our families. And the fight is now.
AMY GOODMAN : Bob Master, in the bigger picture, number of strikes at an all-time low in this country right now—
ROBERT MASTER : Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : —the power of unions, and do you see other companies looking at what is happening here with this Verizon strike?
ROBERT MASTER : I do, and I think workers and community organizations and progressives around the country are looking to us to draw a line in the sand, that has significance, I think, all across the country. A lot of people are starting to talk about the Verizon strike as a potential private-sector Wisconsin. I think there—we see it with our members, and I think we see it among our allies. There&#8217;s tremendous anger at what has happened in this country, especially over the last several years since the financial crisis in 2008, in a sense that people like Ivan Seidenberg and Lowell McAdam, the top executives, have enriched themselves—you know, Seidenberg makes 300 times what the average worker makes—and yet, they turn around and say that workers can&#8217;t have good health benefits; workers can&#8217;t have pensions; workers, you know, if they get hurt on the job, aren&#8217;t going to get benefits. And people are saying, &quot;It&#8217;s enough. We&#8217;ve had it. We have to draw the line.&quot; And so, we have a sense that people are really—really want to be part of this fight to draw the line, in the same way that the people of Wisconsin drew a line against Scott Walker.
AMY GOODMAN : Finally, Pam, how long are you prepared to strike?
PAMELA GALPERN : One day longer than the company. We&#8217;re prepared to be out there for as long as it takes.
AMY GOODMAN : And for people who are concerned about what is happening, who are Verizon users or not Verizon users, but not working for Verizon, what do you feel they can do?
PAMELA GALPERN : Right now we&#8217;re asking people to come out to the picket lines, to come out to the Verizon Wireless stores and support the picket lines. And there&#8217;s a petition to Lowell McAdam right now. All of it is on the CWA website, which is www.cwa-union.org . And there will be a lot of solidarity activities—Bob can talk about that a little bit—that are going to be generated over the next few weeks.
AMY GOODMAN : We have 10 seconds.
ROBERT MASTER : The main thing we&#8217;re focusing on is encouraging people to go to the Verizon Wireless stores. Anybody who carries a picket sign that says on it, &quot; CWA on strike against Verizon Wireless,&quot; can picket a Verizon Wireless store anywhere in America. So that would be tremendously helpful to us. We expect a long battle. We need the help of people across the country.
AMY GOODMAN : We wish that Verizon were able to join us today. We will certainly continue to cover what is happening with the Verizon strike. Bob Master, thanks for being with us, spokesperson for Communications Workers of America, and Pamela Galpern, a striking Verizon worker. AMYGOODMAN: We turn now to what’s happening in the United States. If you happen to call the telecommunications company Verizon today, you may hear a message that sounds like this.

VERIZONRECORDEDMESSAGE: Thanks for calling Verizon. You can now reach us at 1-800-VERIZON for all of your needs. Please be advised, due to a strike, you may experience significant delays in having your call answered. Visit us on the web at Verizon.com, or I will be glad to help you in our automated system.

AMYGOODMAN: Forty-five thousand workers at Verizon have entered their fifth day on strike in what’s been described as the nation’s largest strike in four years. The strike was called after negotiations broke down between Verizon and two unions representing the workers, Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Verizon was attempting to cut health and pension benefits for workers and make it easier for the company to fire workers. The workers on strike are employed in Verizon’s fixed-line division covering landline phones, DSL internet, FiOS cable TV and internet. Workers at Verizon Wireless are not unionized.

Verizon says the benefit cuts are needed because its wireline business has been in decline for more than a decade, as more people switch to using cell phones exclusively. But union officials have rejected Verizon’s argument. As the nation’s second-largest U.S. phone carrier, Verizon earned $6.9 billion in net income for the first six months of the year. Verizon’s outgoing CEO, Ivan Seidenberg, earned more than $18 million in total compensation in 2010, roughly $49,000 a day.

Democracy Now!’s Jaisal Noor spoke to some striking workers at a Verizon picket line in Manhattan on Wednesday.

PETER D’ESPOSITO: My name is Peter D’Esposito. I’ve been with Verizon for 32 years. We’re here today because we’re on strike against the Verizon Corporation. We’ve been negotiating a contract since June 22nd. Our contract went up Sunday at midnight. And unfortunately, all of—there’s been no movement in the contract. That’s why we’re here. Our demands are to hold on to what we worked for for the last 50 years. And what I mean by that, our medical benefits, our pensions, our job security, local issues like transfers.

KIMARTIS: I just want everybody to know that—don’t believe everything that you hear. Verizon is a multi-billion-dollar corporation. They could afford to pay us for years to come and not feel it. This is just an example of corporate greed. And my question is, how much is enough? When is it enough?

GAIL: Well, what we’re really striking for is because we need to keep jobs in the U.S. We need to stimulate our economy. The working-class, the middle-class families are the families that are suffering. And without them, then that means that the U.S. is going to be taking a downward spiral. And what we need to realize is that this does not just affect us here at Verizon, CWA and IBEW, this affects all unions, because once one union is taken down, then they’re going to go after all the other unions.

DOMINICRENDA: If we strike Verizon and win, it can give confidence to people throughout this country that they can also take on their bosses, whether it be a government job or whether it be in the private sector, and also win. Instead of us being brought down to where everybody else is, you know, making peanuts and having benefits you have to pay into, if benefits at all, that everybody else should learn from us, take on their employer and fight for the things that we all deserve.

AMYGOODMAN: Some of the Verizon workers who are on strike. To talk more about the strike, we’re joined by two guests. Bob Master is a spokesperson for Communications Workers of America, and Pamela Galpern is a striking Verizon worker and union activist. We did invite Verizon to join us on the program, but a company spokesperson declined our invitation.

Bob Master, lay out this strike, how significant it is in the country today.

ROBERTMASTER: Well, I think that the workers that you had on, you know, the last few minutes really explained it extremely well. This really represents everything that’s gone wrong in this country today, where the richest are trying to make the working class and the middle class pay the price of, you know, whatever is happening. And the truth of the matter is, you know, this is a corporation that made $22.5 billion over the last four years, paid its top five executives a quarter of a billion dollars, and yet they want to strip workers of retirement security, health security, employment security, cut benefits for workers who get hurt on the job, cut paid sick leave. It’s just wrong. It’s not the way we should be going.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, we did invite Verizon on the show; they declined our invitation. But on Verizon’s website, they write, "Profits from Verizon’s wireline business have declined dramatically due to increased consumer demand for wireless and Internet-based communication services. Today, Verizon spends $4 billion annually on employee health care, and certain representatives of CWA’s described 'middle class' workforce earn a total of $140,000 annually in total compensation and benefits. Faced with these realities, the company must make changes to its cost structure to remain competitive." Bob?

ROBERTMASTER: First of all, one thing people should know is that there are actually 70 technicians who work for Verizon Wireless who are actually also on strike. And in light of Verizon’s logic, we don’t see Verizon offering them gigantic raises because of all the profits they’re generating. So there’s quite a double standard.

The second thing is, is that they say that the wireline is declining, but when they talk to—

AMYGOODMAN: And explain wireline.

ROBERTMASTER: Wireline is the traditional network, which has also been transformed by a $20 billion national investment in the most advanced telecommunications technology in the world, the so-called FiOS product, which is high-speed internet and TV, which our members, like Pam, are installing and building, repairing and so forth. So we are helping to generate that profit. In the second quarter, Verizon told investors on Wall Street, "Our wireline margins have increased for the last five consecutive quarters." So they cry "poor" when the strike begins, but when they talk to Wall Street, they talk about how well the product is doing.

AMYGOODMAN: Pam Galpern, what do you do at Verizon?

PAMELAGALPERN: I’m a field technician in construction, so I’m what’s called a splicer.

AMYGOODMAN: And why have you decided to go out on strike?

PAMELAGALPERN: Verizon has basically launched a full-scale attack on our jobs, our living standards, our wages, our benefits. As one of the other workers said, they’ve been negotiating at the negotiating table since June 22nd. They brought forward a hundred proposals that would essentially destroy—roll back 40 years of collective bargaining and destroy the good jobs that we have. And the company did not move on any of their proposals during the six weeks of bargaining. So when the contract expired, there were still a hundred proposals on the table that would essentially destroy the good jobs that Verizon workers have fought for over many years. There was a 17-week strike in 1989 over health benefits.

And we have—essentially, the company has said, "Despite the fact that we’re hugely profitable, we are going to take advantage of the economic situation in the company right now to try to roll back the wages, the benefits, the job security of our workers." And it’s really corporate greed run rampant. The company is taking advantage of the current situation to try to put a tremendous level of sacrifice on the workers who build the network, who maintain the network, who do the work, who have done the work to make the company as profitable as it is.

AMYGOODMAN: How is the company working now, with all of you out on strike?

PAMELAGALPERN: Well, we have people picketing every location. We have people picketing everywhere that Verizon work is being done. I don’t think that they’re getting very much work done. We’re also picketing at the Verizon Wireless stores and asking people not to shop there. I think that they have—they have brought in managers from all over the country, but they don’t know how to do the job. We’re the ones who know how to do the job. We’re the ones who know how to build and maintain the network. And we’re the ones who really know how to keep things up and running. The company, the managers that they’ve brought in are being put in a situation they don’t know what they’re doing, and they’re also working in extremely unsafe conditions.

AMYGOODMAN:Boston Globe says, "Verizon saying that service lines have been sabotaged in more than a dozen instances and that some nonunion employees have been assaulted by union members. Meanwhile, the unions [reported that] members in Amherst, N.Y., were hit by a car as a replacement worker attempted to drive through the picket line."

PAMELAGALPERN: One of the executives from Verizon Wireless, before the strike started, said, "You’re going to see" — said to management, "You’re going to see picketers, and you’re going to feel like running them over." And I think a lot of the managers who were brought in heard that and took it as a mandate to basically have very little regard for the picketers. So there have been a number of incidents—and Bob can talk about it more—of picketers being hit by Verizon managers.

ROBERTMASTER: We have two dozen reports now confirmed of really aggressive, reckless driving by managers going through picket lines. A number of workers on the picket line have been hit. Several have gone to the hospital. So, there’s a lot of allegations by management about things that we’re doing; at the same time, there’s no taking of responsibility for the reckless behavior of a lot of the people that they’ve brought in to try to do the work that Pam and her brothers and sisters have been—you know, would have been doing under normal circumstances.

ROBERTMASTER: The company has been viciously anti-union. This group of technicians, these 70 technicians, organized—

AMYGOODMAN: Out of how many?

ROBERTMASTER: Oh, out of about 75,000 or 80,000 total at Verizon Wireless. This group of technicians actually joined the union when it was NYNEX Mobile during the 1989 strike. And we’ve been able to maintain that bargaining unit. But at Verizon Wireless, the company has exercised enormous amounts of fear and intimidation to try to keep the union out. And when we did have some organizing drives at a couple of call centers in Morristown, New Jersey, and in Rockland County, they closed them and moved them to South Carolina.

AMYGOODMAN: Do you get your last paycheck tomorrow, Pam?

PAMELAGALPERN: We get our last paycheck today.

AMYGOODMAN: Today?

PAMELAGALPERN: Yes.

AMYGOODMAN: So, what are you going to do?

PAMELAGALPERN: Well—

AMYGOODMAN: Does the union have strike fund set up?

PAMELAGALPERN: The union has a strike fund.

AMYGOODMAN: That’s CWA?

PAMELAGALPERN:CWA has a strike fund. CWA has a strike fund.

AMYGOODMAN:IBEW doesn’t?

PAMELAGALPERN:IBEW does not. And I think that it’s going to be tough for people. Today is the last paycheck. I also think that workers know that our jobs and our livelihood and our future is on the line. And they know that we might have to sacrifice right now in order to lay the groundwork for our future and to have a future, to have a future with this company. And the workers that I’ve talked to are ready to make that sacrifice. We know it’s going to be tough. Financially, it’s going to be very difficult. But I think that people know that this really is a fight for our jobs and for our future and for our families. And the fight is now.

AMYGOODMAN: Bob Master, in the bigger picture, number of strikes at an all-time low in this country right now—

ROBERTMASTER: Yeah.

AMYGOODMAN: —the power of unions, and do you see other companies looking at what is happening here with this Verizon strike?

ROBERTMASTER: I do, and I think workers and community organizations and progressives around the country are looking to us to draw a line in the sand, that has significance, I think, all across the country. A lot of people are starting to talk about the Verizon strike as a potential private-sector Wisconsin. I think there—we see it with our members, and I think we see it among our allies. There’s tremendous anger at what has happened in this country, especially over the last several years since the financial crisis in 2008, in a sense that people like Ivan Seidenberg and Lowell McAdam, the top executives, have enriched themselves—you know, Seidenberg makes 300 times what the average worker makes—and yet, they turn around and say that workers can’t have good health benefits; workers can’t have pensions; workers, you know, if they get hurt on the job, aren’t going to get benefits. And people are saying, "It’s enough. We’ve had it. We have to draw the line." And so, we have a sense that people are really—really want to be part of this fight to draw the line, in the same way that the people of Wisconsin drew a line against Scott Walker.

AMYGOODMAN: Finally, Pam, how long are you prepared to strike?

PAMELAGALPERN: One day longer than the company. We’re prepared to be out there for as long as it takes.

AMYGOODMAN: And for people who are concerned about what is happening, who are Verizon users or not Verizon users, but not working for Verizon, what do you feel they can do?

PAMELAGALPERN: Right now we’re asking people to come out to the picket lines, to come out to the Verizon Wireless stores and support the picket lines. And there’s a petition to Lowell McAdam right now. All of it is on the CWA website, which is www.cwa-union.org. And there will be a lot of solidarity activities—Bob can talk about that a little bit—that are going to be generated over the next few weeks.

AMYGOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.

ROBERTMASTER: The main thing we’re focusing on is encouraging people to go to the Verizon Wireless stores. Anybody who carries a picket sign that says on it, "CWA on strike against Verizon Wireless," can picket a Verizon Wireless store anywhere in America. So that would be tremendously helpful to us. We expect a long battle. We need the help of people across the country.

AMYGOODMAN: We wish that Verizon were able to join us today. We will certainly continue to cover what is happening with the Verizon strike. Bob Master, thanks for being with us, spokesperson for Communications Workers of America, and Pamela Galpern, a striking Verizon worker.

]]>
Thu, 11 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400"A Declaration of War on the Poor": Cornel West and Tavis Smiley on the Debt Ceiling Agreementhttp://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/9/a_declaration_of_war_on_the
tag:democracynow.org,2011-08-09:en/story/81f94d AMY GOODMAN : On the heels of last week&#8217;s deficit agreement, which widely criticized—was widely criticized for excluding a tax hike on the wealthy, as well as any measures to tackle high unemployment, the Congressional Black Caucus has launched a month-long campaign to address staggering unemployment rates among African Americans. In Detroit, Cleveland and Los Angeles, two cities that are stops on the tour, the unemployment rates are in the 40 percent range. The caucus chair last week slammed the deficit deal as a &quot;Satan sandwich&quot; that unfairly harms African Americans. Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports Obama will embark on his own jobs tour that will take place in the middle of the caucus&#8217;s campaign.
Well, we are now going to turn to two leading African-American voices. They have hit the road to challenge President Obama&#8217;s record on poverty. The veteran broadcaster, Tavis Smiley, the author, Princeton University professor, Cornel West, are in the midst of a 15-city, cross-country trek they&#8217;ve called &quot;The Poverty Tour: A Call to Conscience.&quot; The tour comes on the heels of last week&#8217;s deficit agreement.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Tell us, Tavis, why you&#8217;re at Kent State right now.
TAVIS SMILEY : We&#8217;re at Kent State now as one of many stops on this tour, as you mentioned, Amy, because we&#8217;re trying to raise awareness about this issue, trying to raise the level of debate and conversation about the plight of the poor in this country. I believe, and Dr. West believes, that it is, in fact, the telling of truth that allows suffering to speak. And if we don&#8217;t speak truth to power—and put another way, truth to the powerless—then they end up being rendered invisible in this country.
You mentioned a moment ago, and you&#8217;re absolutely right about this, this deficit-reduction plan, this debt-ceiling plan, that Congress came together on and the President signed, unfortunately, I think is a declaration of war on the poor. Any legislation that doesn&#8217;t extend unemployment benefits, doesn&#8217;t close a single corporate loophole, doesn&#8217;t raise one cent of new revenue in terms of taxes on the rich or the lucky, allows corporate America to get away scot-free again—the banks, Wall Street getting away again—and all these cuts ostensibly on the backs of everyday people.
This conversation now about the poor in this country needs to happen, and so we&#8217;re out here trying to dramatize that and trying to ensure that this time around, in this presidential debate, Mr. Obama and whoever his Republican opponent will be are going to be forced to address the issue, the ever-expanding issue, of the poor in this country.
AMY GOODMAN : You know, before I turn to Cornel West, I was speaking yesterday to Harry Belafonte, the famous singer, actor, activist. I interviewed him earlier this year about his meeting with Cornel. It was before President Obama was president. And this is what he had to say about his conversation with, at the time, Senator Obama.
HARRY BELAFONTE : Every opportunity I’ve had to put that before him, he has heard. I have not had a chance to put it to him as forcefully as I would like to, because he has not yet given us the accessibility to those places where this could be said in a more articulate way and not always on the fly.
But he once said something to me during his campaign for the presidency, and he says—he said, you know—I said, &quot;I’ve heard you&quot; —he was talking before businessmen on Wall Street here in—there in New York. And he said to me—I said, &quot;Well, you know, I hope you bring the challenge more forcefully to the table.&quot; And he said, &quot;Well, when are you and Cornel West going to cut me some slack?&quot; And I got caught with that remark. And I said to him, in rebuttal, I said, &quot;What makes you think we haven’t?&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : That was Harry Belafonte. Cornel West, your response, and why you&#8217;re on this tour, professor at Princeton University?
CORNEL WEST : Well, yeah, we know Harry Belafonte&#8217;s idea of brotherhood. No, Brother Tavis came up with the idea of this Poverty Tour. We&#8217;re on the tour because there has been a top-down, one-sided class war against poor and working people, that&#8217;s led by greedy Wall Street oligarchs and avaricious corporate plutocrats in the name of deregulated markets, which is a morally bankrupt policy, especially when it comes to keeping track of the humanity and dignity of poor and working people. We started with our indigenous brothers and sisters in—
TAVIS SMILEY : Hayward, Wisconsin.
CORNEL WEST : Hayward, Wisconsin.
TAVIS SMILEY : Lac Courte Oreilles.
CORNEL WEST : Lac Courte Oreilles, that&#8217;s it. I wanted to get that right. We spent time with the Hmong workers there in Eau Claire. We were with warehouse workers there in Joliet. We were in Chicago, Detroit. We met with homeless veterans yesterday in—
TAVIS SMILEY : Akron, Ohio.
CORNEL WEST : —in Akron, Ohio. I mean, we went everywhere. We&#8217;re going to spend time with poor whites, poor blacks, poor brown, poor yellow. We&#8217;re trying to reconstitute what Brother Martin Luther King, Jr., died for, which is bringing poor and working people together in the face of these class attacks.
AMY GOODMAN : What is your analysis, Tavis Smiley, of the debt deal?
TAVIS SMILEY : As I tried to emanate a moment ago, I think it&#8217;s a declaration of war. We all know—and this is why The War and Peace Report , Amy, is so important, and we celebrate you and revel in your humanity and the work that you do every day to raise these issues. Dr. King once said, as you well know, Amy, that &quot;war is the enemy of the poor.&quot; &quot;War is the enemy of the poor.&quot; Congress has the power obviously to declare war. They&#8217;ve done that far too many times. We&#8217;re engaged in some excursions right now that we need to find a way to get out of immediately, if not sooner. As my granddad might say, &quot;sooner than at once and quicker than right now,&quot; we need to get out of these wars that we&#8217;re engaged in, because war is the enemy of the poor. So Congress has the power to declare war, and I think they&#8217;ve done that once again. This time, though, they&#8217;ve declared war on the poor. That&#8217;s what this legislation, for me, is all about. I think Congressman Cleaver is right: it&#8217;s a Satan sandwich. And I don&#8217;t want to take—I don&#8217;t want to partake and bite into that.
The bottom line is that our body politic—I want to be clear about this—both Republicans and Democrats, both Congress and the White House, and for that matter, all of the American people, have got to take the issue of the poor more seriously. Why? Because the new poor, the new poor, are the former middle class. Obviously, the polls tell these elected officials, these politicians, that you ought to talk about the middle class, that resonates. Well, if the new poor are the former middle class, then this conversation has got to be expanded. We&#8217;ve got to have a broader conversation about what&#8217;s happening to the poor. And the bottom line for me is this, Amy, with regard to this legislation and all others that are now demonizing, casting aspersion on the poor. There&#8217;s always been a connection between the poor and crime, but now—between poverty and crime, but now it&#8217;s become a crime, it would seem, to be poor in this country. And I believe this country, one day, is going to get crushed under the weight of its own poverty, if we think we can continue to live in a country where one percent of the people own and control more wealth than 90 percent. That math, long term, Amy, is unsustainable. We&#8217;ve got to talk about poverty.
AMY GOODMAN : A new report from the Washington, D.C.-based conservative think tank Heritage Foundation finds Americans living in poverty are doing better than they have ever been and the definition of poverty needs to be redefined. So Stephen Colbert featured the report last month, right, on Comedy Central on The Colbert Report . I just wanted to play an excerpt from his show.
STEPHEN COLBERT : Jesus said the poor would always be with us. Well, it turns out Jesus does not know everything. For more, Fox News&#8217; Stu Varney makes words come out of his mouth.
STUART VARNEY : When you think of poverty, you picture this. But what if I told you it really looks like this? A new report showing poor families in the United States are not what they used to be. I&#8217;m just going to give our viewers a quick run-through of what items poor families in America have. Ninety-nine percent of them have a refrigerator. Eighty-one percent have a microwave.
STEPHEN COLBERT : A refrigerator and a microwave? They can preserve and heat food? Ooh la la. I guess the poor are too good for mold and trichinosis. It&#8217;s all here, folks, in the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation&#8217;s new report, &quot;Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox: What is Poverty in the United States Today?&quot; And if you watched closely in Stu Varney&#8217;s report just then, you saw that evidently poverty is the plasma flat-screen aisle at Best Buy. And you will not believe some of the stuff poor people have in their homes: luxuries like ceiling fans, DVD players.
AMY GOODMAN : There you have Stephen Colbert, an excerpt of his response to the Heritage Foundation report, &quot;Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox: What is Poverty in the United States Today?&quot; That&#8217;s the title of the Heritage Foundation report. Cornel West, your response?
CORNEL WEST : No, thank God for Brother Colbert. The Heritage Foundation has been spreading lies to justify indifference toward poor people for three decades as part of the right-wing intellectual assault on working and poor people. Tavis and I were at Camp Forest tent city outside of Ann Arbor. They&#8217;ve been there a number of years. And in fact, they just got heat, what was it, two years ago. They&#8217;ve been there for many years. They just got heat. So, the Heritage Foundation, they ought to be ashamed of themselves, but this is part of the fightback. The Heritage Foundation supports the counter-revolution in the name of oligarchs and plutocrats. We want to be part of the fightback, and there&#8217;s millions out there who want to be part of the fightback, as the oligarchs and plutocrats attempt to squeeze all of the democratic juices out of the American social experiment.
AMY GOODMAN : This is a listening tour, Tavis Smiley, as you&#8217;ve described it. Talk about what you&#8217;ve heard, as you go from Chicago to Akron, Ohio. Talk about what people are telling you. Thousands of people are turning out. You were on the South Side of Chicago; this is where President Obama spent so many years.
TAVIS SMILEY : We&#8217;re hearing a number of things. Let me try to give you three right quick, in no particular order. Number one, these unemployment numbers are real. And it&#8217;s very clear to me and other economists who are willing to be honest about this that whatever numbers the government is giving us about unemployment, the numbers are far worse, because so many Americans have stopped looking for work. We talked to a group last night of unemployed, homeless, military veterans—Army, Navy, Marines—a room full of them, just outside of Kent State last night in Akron, Ohio, and to hear these persons, who have put their lives on the line for this country, who cannot find work. A woman named Hillary last night has been out of work for three years, and she broke down last night crying, weeping uncontrollably about the fact that she keeps applying and reapplying. She cannot find work. Unemployment here in Akron, Ohio, a bellwether state in these presidential elections every four years—unemployment is off the charts here. And these, last night, just happen to be primarily, overwhelmingly white Americans. So, when we talk about unemployment, we&#8217;re not just talking about black folk and brown folk. Across the board, too many Americans are unemployed, and the numbers that we are given every month are not really as accurate as they ought to be, number one.
CORNEL WEST : That&#8217;s right.
TAVIS SMILEY : Number two, we&#8217;re hearing from people that the process is broken, our political process is broken, and there&#8217;s a hopelessness in this country right now. I just returned from China, Amy, some weeks ago, and in China—and I could debate all day long, and I&#8217;ve got issues with the way they do a lot of stuff in China, but there is a sense of hopefulness about their future. And you hear, across this country, so many Americans who sense a hopelessness about the future of this country. So many Americans now think that our best days as a nation are behind us, and we&#8217;re hearing that too often on this tour.
But we&#8217;re also hearing—we&#8217;re also hearing that there&#8217;s got to be a commitment to everyday people, a commitment to the poor. If we can find a way to get the debt ceiling raised, if we can find a trillion dollars for these military excursions, etc., etc., etc., why can&#8217;t we get serious and come together in Washington, perhaps at a White House conference on poverty—hint, hint—to talk about a way to eradicate poverty in 10, 15, 20 years. It can be done if we commit ourselves to it. And the poor are feeling more and more invisible. The worst thing you can do to a human being is to make him or her feel invisible, as if they don&#8217;t matter, as if they&#8217;re throwaway, as if they&#8217;re disposable. And too many Americans are feeling that right about now.
AMY GOODMAN : A recent Washington Post / ABC News poll found 86 percent of African Americans expressed approval of the job President Obama is doing, even as support for him has slipped among other groups. This is from the Washington Post . The view is nuanced, though: &quot;Among blacks, approval of the president&#8217;s economic policies has weakened, with only 54 percent saying the policies have made the economy better compared with 77 percent in October.&quot; Cornel West, you have been both a supporter of Senator Obama in becoming president and a fierce critic. These polls are shifting, even among his hugest support group. What about what has happened, and where you think President Obama is trying to take the country, and where you think it needs to go?
CORNEL WEST : Well, I think, on the one hand, large numbers of black people rightly want to protect President Obama against the vicious right-wing attacks, the Fox News-like attacks, the lies about him being socialist, Muslim and so forth. On the other hand, the suffering intensifies. It&#8217;s very clear that President Obama caves in over and over and over again. He punts on first down. If you&#8217;re in a foxhole with him, you&#8217;re in trouble, because he wants to compromise, you want to fight. He doesn&#8217;t have the kind of backbone he ought to have. So black folk find themselves in a dilemma: how do we protect him against the right-wing attacks and at the same time keep him accountable, especially when it comes to poor and working people?
Unfortunately, Tim Geithner and his economic team have nothing to do with the legacy of Martin King, have indifference toward poor and working people. He listens to them, hence he&#8217;s rightly associated much more with the oligarchs than with poor people. We hope he changes his mind. We hope he gets a progressive economic team, even though, as you know, many of us are exploring other kinds of possibilities in the coming election, given his lukewarmness.
AMY GOODMAN : What are you exploring exactly? Are you talking about another candidate running for president?
CORNEL WEST : It would be a Bernie Sanders-like figure who is fundamentally committed to the legacy of Martin King and Fannie Lou Hamer and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Dorothy Day, putting poor and working people at the center.
AMY GOODMAN : When you say Bernie Sanders-type, is Bernie Sanders considering running for president?
CORNEL WEST : Unfortunately, I don&#8217;t think so.
TAVIS SMILEY : He said he&#8217;s not.
CORNEL WEST : I wish he was, because he&#8217;s my kind of brother. But someone like that who&#8217;s got backbone and courage.
AMY GOODMAN : Tavis Smiley, would you like to see someone else run, and are you considering it yourself?
TAVIS SMILEY : That right there is the joke of the day. Actually, Dr. West has a great line about that, Amy. You should have asked him that question; he has a great line. He says, you would much sooner find him in a crack house than in the White House. That&#8217;s his response to that.
As you well know, my role on public television and public radio doesn&#8217;t put me in the realm of endorsing candidates. I have not done that. My role is to talk about accountability, to challenge folk to reexamine the assumptions they hold about the poor, to help them expand their inventory of ideas, to introduce Americans to the poor with these platforms that I have. So I&#8217;m not in the endorsing business, I&#8217;m in the accountability business. And that&#8217;s why we&#8217;re on this Poverty Tour.
But to your question, I don&#8217;t think the President would be hurt, necessarily—the country certainly would not be hurt—by a primary challenge that would refocus him on what really matters. It would refocus him on what&#8217;s happening to too many people in this country. It would refocus him on a more progressive agenda. But having said that, I think if the race were held today, the President still wins. You can&#8217;t beat somebody with nobody, and I don&#8217;t see who the somebody is that can beat the President. So, Doc and I have had many debates, and I&#8217;m sure we&#8217;re going to get right back at this debate once we get on the bus again and take off to the next city in just a few minutes on the Poverty Tour.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re going to have to leave it there.
TAVIS SMILEY : But I think that a challenge would refocus him—
AMY GOODMAN : Tavis, we&#8217;re going to have to leave it there. Tavis Smiley and Cornel West, thanks so much for joining us. AMYGOODMAN: On the heels of last week’s deficit agreement, which widely criticized—was widely criticized for excluding a tax hike on the wealthy, as well as any measures to tackle high unemployment, the Congressional Black Caucus has launched a month-long campaign to address staggering unemployment rates among African Americans. In Detroit, Cleveland and Los Angeles, two cities that are stops on the tour, the unemployment rates are in the 40 percent range. The caucus chair last week slammed the deficit deal as a "Satan sandwich" that unfairly harms African Americans. Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports Obama will embark on his own jobs tour that will take place in the middle of the caucus’s campaign.

Well, we are now going to turn to two leading African-American voices. They have hit the road to challenge President Obama’s record on poverty. The veteran broadcaster, Tavis Smiley, the author, Princeton University professor, Cornel West, are in the midst of a 15-city, cross-country trek they’ve called "The Poverty Tour: A Call to Conscience." The tour comes on the heels of last week’s deficit agreement.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Tell us, Tavis, why you’re at Kent State right now.

TAVISSMILEY: We’re at Kent State now as one of many stops on this tour, as you mentioned, Amy, because we’re trying to raise awareness about this issue, trying to raise the level of debate and conversation about the plight of the poor in this country. I believe, and Dr. West believes, that it is, in fact, the telling of truth that allows suffering to speak. And if we don’t speak truth to power—and put another way, truth to the powerless—then they end up being rendered invisible in this country.

You mentioned a moment ago, and you’re absolutely right about this, this deficit-reduction plan, this debt-ceiling plan, that Congress came together on and the President signed, unfortunately, I think is a declaration of war on the poor. Any legislation that doesn’t extend unemployment benefits, doesn’t close a single corporate loophole, doesn’t raise one cent of new revenue in terms of taxes on the rich or the lucky, allows corporate America to get away scot-free again—the banks, Wall Street getting away again—and all these cuts ostensibly on the backs of everyday people.

This conversation now about the poor in this country needs to happen, and so we’re out here trying to dramatize that and trying to ensure that this time around, in this presidential debate, Mr. Obama and whoever his Republican opponent will be are going to be forced to address the issue, the ever-expanding issue, of the poor in this country.

AMYGOODMAN: You know, before I turn to Cornel West, I was speaking yesterday to Harry Belafonte, the famous singer, actor, activist. I interviewed him earlier this year about his meeting with Cornel. It was before President Obama was president. And this is what he had to say about his conversation with, at the time, Senator Obama.

HARRYBELAFONTE: Every opportunity I’ve had to put that before him, he has heard. I have not had a chance to put it to him as forcefully as I would like to, because he has not yet given us the accessibility to those places where this could be said in a more articulate way and not always on the fly.

But he once said something to me during his campaign for the presidency, and he says—he said, you know—I said, "I’ve heard you" —he was talking before businessmen on Wall Street here in—there in New York. And he said to me—I said, "Well, you know, I hope you bring the challenge more forcefully to the table." And he said, "Well, when are you and Cornel West going to cut me some slack?" And I got caught with that remark. And I said to him, in rebuttal, I said, "What makes you think we haven’t?"

AMYGOODMAN: That was Harry Belafonte. Cornel West, your response, and why you’re on this tour, professor at Princeton University?

CORNELWEST: Well, yeah, we know Harry Belafonte’s idea of brotherhood. No, Brother Tavis came up with the idea of this Poverty Tour. We’re on the tour because there has been a top-down, one-sided class war against poor and working people, that’s led by greedy Wall Street oligarchs and avaricious corporate plutocrats in the name of deregulated markets, which is a morally bankrupt policy, especially when it comes to keeping track of the humanity and dignity of poor and working people. We started with our indigenous brothers and sisters in—

TAVISSMILEY: Hayward, Wisconsin.

CORNELWEST: Hayward, Wisconsin.

TAVISSMILEY: Lac Courte Oreilles.

CORNELWEST: Lac Courte Oreilles, that’s it. I wanted to get that right. We spent time with the Hmong workers there in Eau Claire. We were with warehouse workers there in Joliet. We were in Chicago, Detroit. We met with homeless veterans yesterday in—

TAVISSMILEY: Akron, Ohio.

CORNELWEST: —in Akron, Ohio. I mean, we went everywhere. We’re going to spend time with poor whites, poor blacks, poor brown, poor yellow. We’re trying to reconstitute what Brother Martin Luther King, Jr., died for, which is bringing poor and working people together in the face of these class attacks.

AMYGOODMAN: What is your analysis, Tavis Smiley, of the debt deal?

TAVISSMILEY: As I tried to emanate a moment ago, I think it’s a declaration of war. We all know—and this is why The War and Peace Report, Amy, is so important, and we celebrate you and revel in your humanity and the work that you do every day to raise these issues. Dr. King once said, as you well know, Amy, that "war is the enemy of the poor." "War is the enemy of the poor." Congress has the power obviously to declare war. They’ve done that far too many times. We’re engaged in some excursions right now that we need to find a way to get out of immediately, if not sooner. As my granddad might say, "sooner than at once and quicker than right now," we need to get out of these wars that we’re engaged in, because war is the enemy of the poor. So Congress has the power to declare war, and I think they’ve done that once again. This time, though, they’ve declared war on the poor. That’s what this legislation, for me, is all about. I think Congressman Cleaver is right: it’s a Satan sandwich. And I don’t want to take—I don’t want to partake and bite into that.

The bottom line is that our body politic—I want to be clear about this—both Republicans and Democrats, both Congress and the White House, and for that matter, all of the American people, have got to take the issue of the poor more seriously. Why? Because the new poor, the new poor, are the former middle class. Obviously, the polls tell these elected officials, these politicians, that you ought to talk about the middle class, that resonates. Well, if the new poor are the former middle class, then this conversation has got to be expanded. We’ve got to have a broader conversation about what’s happening to the poor. And the bottom line for me is this, Amy, with regard to this legislation and all others that are now demonizing, casting aspersion on the poor. There’s always been a connection between the poor and crime, but now—between poverty and crime, but now it’s become a crime, it would seem, to be poor in this country. And I believe this country, one day, is going to get crushed under the weight of its own poverty, if we think we can continue to live in a country where one percent of the people own and control more wealth than 90 percent. That math, long term, Amy, is unsustainable. We’ve got to talk about poverty.

AMYGOODMAN: A new report from the Washington, D.C.-based conservative think tank Heritage Foundation finds Americans living in poverty are doing better than they have ever been and the definition of poverty needs to be redefined. So Stephen Colbert featured the report last month, right, on Comedy Central on The Colbert Report. I just wanted to play an excerpt from his show.

STEPHENCOLBERT: Jesus said the poor would always be with us. Well, it turns out Jesus does not know everything. For more, Fox News’ Stu Varney makes words come out of his mouth.

STUARTVARNEY: When you think of poverty, you picture this. But what if I told you it really looks like this? A new report showing poor families in the United States are not what they used to be. I’m just going to give our viewers a quick run-through of what items poor families in America have. Ninety-nine percent of them have a refrigerator. Eighty-one percent have a microwave.

STEPHENCOLBERT: A refrigerator and a microwave? They can preserve and heat food? Ooh la la. I guess the poor are too good for mold and trichinosis. It’s all here, folks, in the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation’s new report, "Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox: What is Poverty in the United States Today?" And if you watched closely in Stu Varney’s report just then, you saw that evidently poverty is the plasma flat-screen aisle at Best Buy. And you will not believe some of the stuff poor people have in their homes: luxuries like ceiling fans, DVD players.

AMYGOODMAN: There you have Stephen Colbert, an excerpt of his response to the Heritage Foundation report, "Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox: What is Poverty in the United States Today?" That’s the title of the Heritage Foundation report. Cornel West, your response?

CORNELWEST: No, thank God for Brother Colbert. The Heritage Foundation has been spreading lies to justify indifference toward poor people for three decades as part of the right-wing intellectual assault on working and poor people. Tavis and I were at Camp Forest tent city outside of Ann Arbor. They’ve been there a number of years. And in fact, they just got heat, what was it, two years ago. They’ve been there for many years. They just got heat. So, the Heritage Foundation, they ought to be ashamed of themselves, but this is part of the fightback. The Heritage Foundation supports the counter-revolution in the name of oligarchs and plutocrats. We want to be part of the fightback, and there’s millions out there who want to be part of the fightback, as the oligarchs and plutocrats attempt to squeeze all of the democratic juices out of the American social experiment.

AMYGOODMAN: This is a listening tour, Tavis Smiley, as you’ve described it. Talk about what you’ve heard, as you go from Chicago to Akron, Ohio. Talk about what people are telling you. Thousands of people are turning out. You were on the South Side of Chicago; this is where President Obama spent so many years.

TAVISSMILEY: We’re hearing a number of things. Let me try to give you three right quick, in no particular order. Number one, these unemployment numbers are real. And it’s very clear to me and other economists who are willing to be honest about this that whatever numbers the government is giving us about unemployment, the numbers are far worse, because so many Americans have stopped looking for work. We talked to a group last night of unemployed, homeless, military veterans—Army, Navy, Marines—a room full of them, just outside of Kent State last night in Akron, Ohio, and to hear these persons, who have put their lives on the line for this country, who cannot find work. A woman named Hillary last night has been out of work for three years, and she broke down last night crying, weeping uncontrollably about the fact that she keeps applying and reapplying. She cannot find work. Unemployment here in Akron, Ohio, a bellwether state in these presidential elections every four years—unemployment is off the charts here. And these, last night, just happen to be primarily, overwhelmingly white Americans. So, when we talk about unemployment, we’re not just talking about black folk and brown folk. Across the board, too many Americans are unemployed, and the numbers that we are given every month are not really as accurate as they ought to be, number one.

CORNELWEST: That’s right.

TAVISSMILEY: Number two, we’re hearing from people that the process is broken, our political process is broken, and there’s a hopelessness in this country right now. I just returned from China, Amy, some weeks ago, and in China—and I could debate all day long, and I’ve got issues with the way they do a lot of stuff in China, but there is a sense of hopefulness about their future. And you hear, across this country, so many Americans who sense a hopelessness about the future of this country. So many Americans now think that our best days as a nation are behind us, and we’re hearing that too often on this tour.

But we’re also hearing—we’re also hearing that there’s got to be a commitment to everyday people, a commitment to the poor. If we can find a way to get the debt ceiling raised, if we can find a trillion dollars for these military excursions, etc., etc., etc., why can’t we get serious and come together in Washington, perhaps at a White House conference on poverty—hint, hint—to talk about a way to eradicate poverty in 10, 15, 20 years. It can be done if we commit ourselves to it. And the poor are feeling more and more invisible. The worst thing you can do to a human being is to make him or her feel invisible, as if they don’t matter, as if they’re throwaway, as if they’re disposable. And too many Americans are feeling that right about now.

AMYGOODMAN: A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll found 86 percent of African Americans expressed approval of the job President Obama is doing, even as support for him has slipped among other groups. This is from the Washington Post. The view is nuanced, though: "Among blacks, approval of the president’s economic policies has weakened, with only 54 percent saying the policies have made the economy better compared with 77 percent in October." Cornel West, you have been both a supporter of Senator Obama in becoming president and a fierce critic. These polls are shifting, even among his hugest support group. What about what has happened, and where you think President Obama is trying to take the country, and where you think it needs to go?

CORNELWEST: Well, I think, on the one hand, large numbers of black people rightly want to protect President Obama against the vicious right-wing attacks, the Fox News-like attacks, the lies about him being socialist, Muslim and so forth. On the other hand, the suffering intensifies. It’s very clear that President Obama caves in over and over and over again. He punts on first down. If you’re in a foxhole with him, you’re in trouble, because he wants to compromise, you want to fight. He doesn’t have the kind of backbone he ought to have. So black folk find themselves in a dilemma: how do we protect him against the right-wing attacks and at the same time keep him accountable, especially when it comes to poor and working people?

Unfortunately, Tim Geithner and his economic team have nothing to do with the legacy of Martin King, have indifference toward poor and working people. He listens to them, hence he’s rightly associated much more with the oligarchs than with poor people. We hope he changes his mind. We hope he gets a progressive economic team, even though, as you know, many of us are exploring other kinds of possibilities in the coming election, given his lukewarmness.

AMYGOODMAN: What are you exploring exactly? Are you talking about another candidate running for president?

CORNELWEST: It would be a Bernie Sanders-like figure who is fundamentally committed to the legacy of Martin King and Fannie Lou Hamer and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Dorothy Day, putting poor and working people at the center.

AMYGOODMAN: When you say Bernie Sanders-type, is Bernie Sanders considering running for president?

CORNELWEST: Unfortunately, I don’t think so.

TAVISSMILEY: He said he’s not.

CORNELWEST: I wish he was, because he’s my kind of brother. But someone like that who’s got backbone and courage.

AMYGOODMAN: Tavis Smiley, would you like to see someone else run, and are you considering it yourself?

TAVISSMILEY: That right there is the joke of the day. Actually, Dr. West has a great line about that, Amy. You should have asked him that question; he has a great line. He says, you would much sooner find him in a crack house than in the White House. That’s his response to that.

As you well know, my role on public television and public radio doesn’t put me in the realm of endorsing candidates. I have not done that. My role is to talk about accountability, to challenge folk to reexamine the assumptions they hold about the poor, to help them expand their inventory of ideas, to introduce Americans to the poor with these platforms that I have. So I’m not in the endorsing business, I’m in the accountability business. And that’s why we’re on this Poverty Tour.

But to your question, I don’t think the President would be hurt, necessarily—the country certainly would not be hurt—by a primary challenge that would refocus him on what really matters. It would refocus him on what’s happening to too many people in this country. It would refocus him on a more progressive agenda. But having said that, I think if the race were held today, the President still wins. You can’t beat somebody with nobody, and I don’t see who the somebody is that can beat the President. So, Doc and I have had many debates, and I’m sure we’re going to get right back at this debate once we get on the bus again and take off to the next city in just a few minutes on the Poverty Tour.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there.

TAVISSMILEY: But I think that a challenge would refocus him—

AMYGOODMAN: Tavis, we’re going to have to leave it there. Tavis Smiley and Cornel West, thanks so much for joining us.

]]>
Tue, 09 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400Cornel West & Tavis Smiley on Obama: "Many of Us Are Exploring Other Possibilities in Coming Election”http://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/9/cornel_west_tavis_smiley_on_obama
tag:democracynow.org,2011-08-09:en/story/732cec AMY GOODMAN : A recent Washington Post / ABC News poll found 86 percent of African Americans expressed approval of the job President Obama is doing, even as support for him has slipped among other groups. This is from the Washington Post . The view is nuanced, though: &quot;Among blacks, approval of the president&#8217;s economic policies has weakened, with only 54 percent saying the policies have made the economy better compared with 77 percent in October.&quot; Cornel West, you have been both a supporter of Senator Obama in becoming president and a fierce critic. These polls are shifting, even among his hugest support group. What about what has happened, and where you think President Obama is trying to take the country, and where you think it needs to go?
CORNEL WEST : Well, I think, on the one hand, large numbers of black people rightly want to protect President Obama against the vicious right-wing attacks, the Fox News-like attacks, the lies about him being socialist, Muslim and so forth. On the other hand, the suffering intensifies. It&#8217;s very clear that President Obama caves in over and over and over again. He punts on first down. If you&#8217;re in a foxhole with him, you&#8217;re in trouble, because he wants to compromise, you want to fight. He doesn&#8217;t have the kind of backbone he ought to have. So black folk find themselves in a dilemma: how do we protect him against the right-wing attacks and at the same time keep him accountable, especially when it comes to poor and working people?
Unfortunately, Tim Geithner and his economic team have nothing to do with the legacy of Martin King, have indifference toward poor and working people. He listens to them, hence he&#8217;s rightly associated much more with the oligarchs than with poor people. We hope he changes his mind. We hope he gets a progressive economic team, even though, as you know, many of us are exploring other kinds of possibilities in the coming election, given his lukewarmness.
AMY GOODMAN : What are you exploring exactly? Are you talking about another candidate running for president?
CORNEL WEST : It would be a Bernie Sanders-like figure who is fundamentally committed to the legacy of Martin King and Fannie Lou Hamer and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Dorothy Day, putting poor and working people at the center.
AMY GOODMAN : When you say Bernie Sanders-type, is Bernie Sanders considering running for president?
CORNEL WEST : Unfortunately, I don&#8217;t think so.
TAVIS SMILEY : He said he&#8217;s not.
CORNEL WEST : I wish he was, because he&#8217;s my kind of brother. But someone like that who&#8217;s got backbone and courage.
AMY GOODMAN : Tavis Smiley, would you like to see someone else run, and are you considering it yourself?
TAVIS SMILEY : That right there is the joke of the day. Actually, Dr. West has a great line about that, Amy. You should have asked him that question; he has a great line. He says, you would much sooner find him in a crack house than in the White House. That&#8217;s his response to that.
As you well know, my role on public television and public radio doesn&#8217;t put me in the realm of endorsing candidates. I have not done that. My role is to talk about accountability, to challenge folk to reexamine the assumptions they hold about the poor, to help them expand their inventory of ideas, to introduce Americans to the poor with these platforms that I have. So I&#8217;m not in the endorsing business, I&#8217;m in the accountability business. And that&#8217;s why we&#8217;re on this Poverty Tour.
But to your question, I don&#8217;t think the President would be hurt, necessarily—the country certainly would not be hurt—by a primary challenge that would refocus him on what really matters. It would refocus him on what&#8217;s happening to too many people in this country. It would refocus him on a more progressive agenda. But having said that, I think if the race were held today, the President still wins. You can&#8217;t beat somebody with nobody, and I don&#8217;t see who the somebody is that can beat the President. So, Doc and I have had many debates, and I&#8217;m sure we&#8217;re going to get right back at this debate once we get on the bus again and take off to the next city in just a few minutes on the Poverty Tour.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re going to have to leave it there.
TAVIS SMILEY : But I think that a challenge would refocus him—
AMY GOODMAN : Tavis, we&#8217;re going to have to leave it there. Tavis Smiley and Cornel West, thanks so much for joining us. AMYGOODMAN: A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll found 86 percent of African Americans expressed approval of the job President Obama is doing, even as support for him has slipped among other groups. This is from the Washington Post. The view is nuanced, though: "Among blacks, approval of the president’s economic policies has weakened, with only 54 percent saying the policies have made the economy better compared with 77 percent in October." Cornel West, you have been both a supporter of Senator Obama in becoming president and a fierce critic. These polls are shifting, even among his hugest support group. What about what has happened, and where you think President Obama is trying to take the country, and where you think it needs to go?

CORNELWEST: Well, I think, on the one hand, large numbers of black people rightly want to protect President Obama against the vicious right-wing attacks, the Fox News-like attacks, the lies about him being socialist, Muslim and so forth. On the other hand, the suffering intensifies. It’s very clear that President Obama caves in over and over and over again. He punts on first down. If you’re in a foxhole with him, you’re in trouble, because he wants to compromise, you want to fight. He doesn’t have the kind of backbone he ought to have. So black folk find themselves in a dilemma: how do we protect him against the right-wing attacks and at the same time keep him accountable, especially when it comes to poor and working people?

Unfortunately, Tim Geithner and his economic team have nothing to do with the legacy of Martin King, have indifference toward poor and working people. He listens to them, hence he’s rightly associated much more with the oligarchs than with poor people. We hope he changes his mind. We hope he gets a progressive economic team, even though, as you know, many of us are exploring other kinds of possibilities in the coming election, given his lukewarmness.

AMYGOODMAN: What are you exploring exactly? Are you talking about another candidate running for president?

CORNELWEST: It would be a Bernie Sanders-like figure who is fundamentally committed to the legacy of Martin King and Fannie Lou Hamer and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Dorothy Day, putting poor and working people at the center.

AMYGOODMAN: When you say Bernie Sanders-type, is Bernie Sanders considering running for president?

CORNELWEST: Unfortunately, I don’t think so.

TAVISSMILEY: He said he’s not.

CORNELWEST: I wish he was, because he’s my kind of brother. But someone like that who’s got backbone and courage.

AMYGOODMAN: Tavis Smiley, would you like to see someone else run, and are you considering it yourself?

TAVISSMILEY: That right there is the joke of the day. Actually, Dr. West has a great line about that, Amy. You should have asked him that question; he has a great line. He says, you would much sooner find him in a crack house than in the White House. That’s his response to that.

As you well know, my role on public television and public radio doesn’t put me in the realm of endorsing candidates. I have not done that. My role is to talk about accountability, to challenge folk to reexamine the assumptions they hold about the poor, to help them expand their inventory of ideas, to introduce Americans to the poor with these platforms that I have. So I’m not in the endorsing business, I’m in the accountability business. And that’s why we’re on this Poverty Tour.

But to your question, I don’t think the President would be hurt, necessarily—the country certainly would not be hurt—by a primary challenge that would refocus him on what really matters. It would refocus him on what’s happening to too many people in this country. It would refocus him on a more progressive agenda. But having said that, I think if the race were held today, the President still wins. You can’t beat somebody with nobody, and I don’t see who the somebody is that can beat the President. So, Doc and I have had many debates, and I’m sure we’re going to get right back at this debate once we get on the bus again and take off to the next city in just a few minutes on the Poverty Tour.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there.

TAVISSMILEY: But I think that a challenge would refocus him—

AMYGOODMAN: Tavis, we’re going to have to leave it there. Tavis Smiley and Cornel West, thanks so much for joining us.

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Tue, 09 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400"Nickel & Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America”: Barbara Ehrenreich on the Job Crisis & Wealth Gaphttp://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/8/nickel_dimed_on_not_getting_by
tag:democracynow.org,2011-08-08:en/story/4dfd67 AMY GOODMAN : Standard &amp; Poor&#8217;s announced Friday it&#8217;s downgraded the U.S. credit rating for the first time in history. The move by S&amp;P, one of three leading credit rating agencies, came just days after Congress approved a $2.1 trillion deficit-reduction plan. S&amp;P called the outlook &quot;negative,&quot; indicating that another downgrade is possible in the next 12 to 18 months. Lowering the nation&#8217;s rating to one notch below AAA , the credit rating company said &quot;political brinkmanship&quot; in the debate over the debt had made the U.S. government&#8217;s ability to manage its finances, quote, &quot;less stable, less effective and less predictable.&quot; It said the $2.1 trillion bipartisan agreement reached last week &quot;fell short&quot; of what was necessary to reduce the nation&#8217;s debt over time.
In its report, S&amp;P explicitly blamed the political process in Washington and the refusal by Republicans to raise taxes as part of last week&#8217;s agreement to raise the debt ceiling, writing, quote, &quot;We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act,&quot; they said.
Speaking to reporters yesterday, Democratic Senator John Kerry blamed Tea Party Republicans who refused to sign on to any deal that raised taxes.
SEN . JOHN KERRY : I believe this is, without question, the Tea Party downgrade. This is the Tea Party downgrade because a minority of people in the House of Representatives countered even the will of many Republicans in the United States Senate, who were prepared to do a bigger deal, to do $4.7 trillion, $4 trillion, have a mix of reductions and reforms, in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, but also recognize that we needed to do some revenue.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, to talk more about the state of the American economy and how it impacts the American people, we go to Washington, D.C., to talk to bestselling author Barbara Ehrenreich.
On her Facebook page, Ehrenreich writes, quote, &quot;My patriotic pride is not offended by S&amp;P&#8217;s downgrade of the US credit rating, but by the fact that while resistance bursts out everywhere—Tel Aviv, Santiago, Tottingham, not to mention No. Africa and Middle East—we do NOTHING .&quot;
The 10th anniversary edition of Barbara Ehrenreich&#8217;s book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America has just been published. In the book, she tells the story of life in low-wage America, and she herself tries to earn a living working as a waitress, a hotel maid, a nursing home aide and a Wal-Mart associate. The book, over the last 10 years, has sold more than two million copies.
She&#8217;s also the author of many other books, including Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America and Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream , a frequent contributor to Harper&#8217;s and The Nation and has also a columnist at the New York Times and Time Magazine .
Barbara Ehrenreich, welcome to Democracy Now!
BARBARA EHRENREICH : Good to be with you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN : It&#8217;s great to have you with us. Before we get to Nickel and Dimed , let&#8217;s talk about Standard &amp; Poor&#8217;s—and perhaps then we&#8217;ll go into poor is the standard in America today—but the significance of this for everyday people in the United States, the downgrading of America&#8217;s credit rating?
BARBARA EHRENREICH : I don&#8217;t know. I&#8217;m not sure. I mean, it&#8217;s part of a general sense of decline that I think we&#8217;ve gotten in many ways and that people like Tom Friedman have been writing about in the New York Times for some time. But, you know, in some ways, that is in another world from most Americans and their day-to-day struggles. What is it going to mean to you if you have no job now? Or if you have a job and you have no health insurance? Or if you are trying to get through college while working full time? It just seems very distant and abstract. When we&#8217;re talking about the economy in this country, we seldom talk about real people&#8217;s lives.
AMY GOODMAN : And that&#8217;s what we&#8217;re going to talk about today. I mean, your book took this country by storm. I am sure there was no one more surprised than you, Barbara. You have written a number of books. You did do something very interesting in Nickel and Dimed , but the fact that it caught on in a time when &quot;prosperity&quot; was the watchword, the buzzword, in the mainstream media—talk about—especially for young people who were 10 years old when the book came out, talk about exactly what you did, what you found then, and what it means today, 10 years later, when &quot;prosperity&quot; is certainly not the buzzword.
BARBARA EHRENREICH : Well, I took on a challenge that I set myself, which was to see whether I could support myself on the money I could earn in, well, obviously entry-level jobs, which are the, you know, kind of jobs where you go and apply, and they&#8217;re not going to ask—you know, they&#8217;re not going to ask for a résumé. They&#8217;re not going to—they don&#8217;t care about anything, except whether you&#8217;re a convicted felon or whether you have—you&#8217;re actually—you know, it&#8217;s legal for you to work in this country. So, I—you mentioned some of the jobs I worked at. I think you left out the maid with a house cleaning service, though. That was a very instructive one. And all these jobs averaged at the time, in around 2000, about $7 an hour, even including the tips with waitressing, which would be equivalent to about $9 an hour now.
And basically, what I found, that for me, just as one person—I wasn&#8217;t trying to support my family with my earnings or anything like that—it just wasn&#8217;t doable, because the rents were so out of line with my earnings. And I did try. I mean, I didn&#8217;t spend any money except on gas, food and, you know, the bare minimum, which was possible to do because I worked at each city for only a month. You know, so I wasn&#8217;t depending—you know, medical care or anything like that was not coming through my jobs.
But I found, you know, a very important thing—well, two very important things. First, at $7 an hour, or $9 an hour in today&#8217;s dollars, you&#8217;re not considered poor. You know, you don&#8217;t show up in the poverty statistics. You&#8217;re considered to be fine if you&#8217;re one individual earning that much. And the other big lesson here is—which is maybe a hard one to remember at a time of high unemployment—is that jobs are not necessarily a cure for poverty. Jobs that don&#8217;t pay enough to live on do not cure poverty. They condemn you, in fact, to a life of low-wage labor and extreme insecurity.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re going to break and then come back to Barbara Ehrenreich. It&#8217;s hard to believe, but her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America came out 10 years ago. And we&#8217;re going to talk about some of the people she met as she wrote this book and where they are today, and where America is. This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Back in a second.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re talking to bestselling author Barbara Ehrenreich. Her book took the country by storm 10 years ago, called Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America . Now it&#8217;s been updated and out again. Barbara Ehrenreich, our guest.
This figure, Barbara, of the number of Americans on food stamps, almost one in six, almost 15 percent. The figures from May, people on food stamps were 12 percent higher than a year earlier, according to the Agriculture Department. One in almost six Americans. And this applies directly to the people that you met, to the jobs that you took—for example, being a Wal-Mart associate. Talk about that and the woman you wrote about and where she is today.
BARBARA EHRENREICH : Yeah, I mean, one of the surprises to me—and it&#8217;s not a surprise anymore, because a lot more research has been done—is how many Wal-Mart employees depend on some kind of government program to supplement their low wages and pathetically inadequate health insurance, which most people can&#8217;t afford anyway. In fact, when you—I noticed that when I went through the orientation for my job at Wal-Mart, and there was a whole table full of new hires sitting around, you know, that they, the Wal-Mart people, asked to see whether anybody here might be eligible for TANF , for example, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, because they&#8217;re kind of depending on that government—those government supplements to keep people going. You&#8217;re not going to do too well on just your Wal-Mart pay. And then, at another time as a Wal-Mart associate, I went to seek food aid. I went to a sort of public/private charitable place that what you could get—you could come out with a sack of food. And when the interviewer—the social worker who interviewed me kept getting me mixed up with somebody. You know, I&#8217;d tell her that I had a car, and then she&#8217;d forget I had a car, and so on. And then she said, &quot;You know, it&#8217;s just—we have other—you know, people are always coming from Wal-Mart. You work at Wal-Mart. I get you mixed up.&quot; And that, to me, was a big clue.
AMY GOODMAN : So, in other words, I mean, you have Wal-Mart, that is famous around the country for fighting unionization, part of the whole movement of corporations that fight tax cuts for the wealthy, for example, is subsidized by the government, is subsidized by the U.S. taxpayers.
BARBARA EHRENREICH : Oh, yes. I mean, in many more ways than that. I mean, there are so many subsidies often involved in luring a Wal-Mart to one&#8217;s area—you know, tax rebates or, you know, things like that. But I was very excited yesterday. I went to the Jobs with Justice conference in Washington, D.C. That&#8217;s an organization that&#8217;s devoted to getting workers rights and improving their standard of living. And there were a number of women Wal-Mart employees there—or &quot;associates,&quot; as they are called—who are now organizing their own workers&#8217; association, called &quot; OUR Walmart.&quot; And this is a new thing. And they were dynamic. So things may be about to change a little.
AMY GOODMAN : Barbara Ehrenreich, in 2009, you co-authored an article called &quot;The Destruction of the Black Middle Class.&quot; And you wrote, quote, &quot;For African Americans—and to a large extent, Latinos—the recession is over. It occurred between 2000 and 2007. [...] What&#8217;s happening now is a depression ,&quot; you wrote.
Well, we&#8217;ve just reported on a new study of the U.S. census data by the Pew Research Center that reveals wealth gaps between whites and people of color in the United States have grown to their widest levels since the U.S. government began tracking them a quarter of a century ago. White Americans now have on average 20 times the net worth of African Americans, 18 times that of Latinos. Last month, we spoke about the findings with Roderick Harrison , who&#8217;s the former chief of racial statistics at the Census Bureau.
RODERICK HARRISON : People use net worth or draw on net worth to invest in their children’s education, to help with perhaps a first home, a down payment for a first home. We’re entering a period now where black and Hispanic families, one-third of whom have no net worth at all or negative net worth, won’t be able to help their children in this way. So this is going to definitely play into the next generation.
AMY GOODMAN : Barbara, your thoughts on the report and of the state of black and Latino middle class in this country, if you can even talk about these—
BARBARA EHRENREICH : Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : —lines anymore?
BARBARA EHRENREICH : Yes. You know, the case of African Americans is very particularly tragic. When you recall that they didn&#8217;t—in the middle of the 20th century, they didn&#8217;t have a lot of wealth compared to white people, because they came from, you know, very underpaid agricultural jobs, often, in the South. Then—and they couldn&#8217;t get credit. You know, that was a big problem. You could not get credit because of racist lending policies. Then, in the 2000s, suddenly, the banks started offering credit actually targeting African Americans, and to a certain extent, Latinos, much more than white people with their subprime mortgages. And it was—you know, it seemed like a great boon to people who hadn&#8217;t had credit before because of racism. Surprise, of course. You know, that was a big part of the wipeout of so much of the black middle class, plus the fact, which is hard to explain, that blacks have been much more likely to be laid off in the peak years of the layoffs in the recession and to be unemployed now, three times more likely.
AMY GOODMAN : Barbara Ehrenreich, talk about some of the other people in Nickel and Dimed that you&#8217;ve caught up with 10 years later, that you met as you eked out your living as a house cleaner, as a maid, as a Wal-Mart associate. Who did you find, and who didn&#8217;t you find?
BARBARA EHRENREICH : Well, I didn&#8217;t find most people. And the reason for that is simple: you may leave that person with an address and a phone number, but those—neither of those is likely to be good in a few months. People—you know, there&#8217;s a lot of insecurity among low-wage people, a lot of turmoil in terms of their housing situation, cell phones get cut off, and so on.
A couple of people, I tracked down. One was not doing that badly. She was still at Wal-Mart. She had advanced to, I think, the huge amount of $10 an hour. But in the meantime, her husband had lost his job, so that, you know, their situation was not at all better. And another woman was piecing together a living cleaning houses and, you know, cooking for other people, sort of what she called &quot;catering.&quot; But she was in very bad health, and it was hard for her to do.
The thing that is so painful is that there&#8217;s no help coming for people like that. There&#8217;s so little help anymore. Food stamps, yes, that&#8217;s a help. And I am very—I was very pleased that Obama expanded the food stamp program in &#39;08 and &#8217;09. He made it easier for many people to get unemployment insurance. Now, of course, it&#39;s been the aim of Republicans in the Congress to eliminate all such things and to eliminate Medicaid. There&#8217;s very little help.
AMY GOODMAN : You&#8217;re extremely critical of President Obama. You&#8217;ve advocated that students not pay back their college loans, among other things. Talk about both.
BARBARA EHRENREICH : Well, I didn&#8217;t come up with that idea, but there is organizing going on among debt-burdened young people, who come out of college, you know, with an average of $25,000 in debt and very likely no job or no professional job that&#8217;s going to help them pay that off. And there&#8217;s a movement among them for debt forgiveness, to just say, &quot;Hey, we cannot do this. You know, we can&#8217;t—we don&#8217;t have the jobs that&#8217;ll allow us to pay these debts off.&quot; And, you know, that&#8217;s kind of exciting. That&#8217;s what&#8217;s going on in Chile right now, has to do with the cost of college, tuition. You know, all the demonstrations in Santiago in the last few days have to do with the cost of college. And I think we&#8217;re going to have to see something like that here, with people just saying, &quot;Can&#8217;t do it. We can&#8217;t do it.&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : Now President Obama, your assessment of him, particularly how he&#8217;s dealing with, or not, the jobs crisis?
BARBARA EHRENREICH : I feel like saying, &quot;What President Obama?&quot; You know, he forgot about jobs, decided to focus instead on the issue the Republicans chose, which was the debt limit and the deficit. This is tragic. I have no explanation. I just—the only little footnote I would add, though, is that jobs are not enough, unless they pay enough for people to live on. And one thing we&#8217;ve seen among American employers—probably employers worldwide, but especially in America recently—is an unquenchable zeal on the part of employers to hold down wages by any means. It&#8217;s not just preventing unionization. It&#8217;s so many little tricks that happen at the workplace. It&#8217;s little tricks like you have to get to work at 7:45 a.m., but the clock doesn&#8217;t start ticking until 8:15 a.m. or something. That&#8217;s wage theft, which is another nice way of saying sort of unpaid labor or a kind of slavery even. We have, you know, so many things that are holding people down.
I would point out—and these are things that I was not aware of when I finished Nickel and Dimed , or they weren&#8217;t, you know, very prominent yet—is that employers no longer want to hire unemployed people. Think about that. They don&#8217;t want to hire people with bad credit ratings. Well, you know, who doesn&#8217;t have a bad credit rating if they&#8217;ve been unemployed for a little while and having to pay their own health insurance and everything? So it&#8217;s as if, you know, you try to climb out, you try to hold on, and you just get kicked in the face, one way or another, and pushed further down.
AMY GOODMAN : Barbara Ehrenreich, the Heritage Foundation came out with a study called &quot;Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox: What is Poverty in the United States Today?&quot; by researchers Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield, who say the U.S. Census Bureau has reported for the past two decades that over 30 million Americans are living in poverty. But, you know, they ask, well, what does it really mean to be poor? And you get, from the headline—cable TV, air conditioning, etc.—what it means to the Heritage Foundation.
BARBARA EHRENREICH : Yes. Robert Rector at the Heritage Foundation has had a campaign for many decades now to prove that the poor in America really live in some kind of luxury. I would like to say, yeah, in some places, boy, you better have air conditioning. You know, in the D.C. area where I live now, you could not have survived very easily the summer, even with occasional cooling centers to go to.
But the truth is, here&#8217;s what&#8217;s happening. More and more people are having to crowd into smaller spaces to live. This is since—this has been going on for a lot of people, you know, for many years. But since the recession, since the financial crisis in &#39;07, you find more and more families—you can have one family per bedroom and somebody, a couch surfer, on the couch in the living room. There&#39;s nothing comfortable about that. You know, one of the things that really woke me up to how bad things were was in &#39;09 when a family member of mine suddenly needed money to pay her mortgage or her home would be taken away. I was able to help, but when I found out the real facts, I was horrified. Her home was a trailer home. Not only that, it&#39;s a dilapidated trailer home. She lives in it—a single-wide trailer home—along with her daughter and two grandchildren. Now that&#8217;s getting down to, you know, third-world levels of poverty, when you crowd that many people into such an inadequate dwelling.
Another thing people are doing: give up on medical care. You know, if we have a healthcare system in the United States, I think its real name is Tylenol. You can&#8217;t—you know, it&#8217;s something you have to drop. You can&#8217;t do it. Food prices are too high. Fuel prices are too high. So you have to give up on those things that it seems like you can get through another day without, even if that&#8217;s your blood pressure medicine.
AMY GOODMAN : There are some—
BARBARA EHRENREICH : So I—
AMY GOODMAN : There are some who are doing very well, of course. The luxury category has posted 10 consecutive months of sales increases compared to a year earlier, this a report in the New York Times . Luxury items are—
BARBARA EHRENREICH : Yes.
AMY GOODMAN : —you know, are flying off the shelves, if yachts can fit on shelves.
BARBARA EHRENREICH : Yes, yes, the rich are back. The rich are back. And that&#8217;s one reason why, when you read some of our major national newspapers, there&#8217;s not much mention anymore of the recession or economic hard times, because the people at the top are doing great. There was an article recently in the New York Times about tree houses that the very wealthy will build for their children, you know, in their backyard, if they even call them &quot;backyards,&quot; on their property—tree houses that can cost as much as $350,000 and include flat-screen TVs and air conditioning. That&#8217;s for the kid to go out in a backyard and play in. Three hundred fifty thousand dollars. You know, I think that&#8217;s flaunting it a little too much.
AMY GOODMAN : Last week, Congress agreed to raise the federal debt ceiling following protracted negotiations. The deal includes no new tax revenue from wealthy Americans, no additional stimulus for the economy. Speaking on the Senate floor, Majority Leader Harry Reid criticized Republicans for blocking the tax hike on the wealthy.
SEN . HARRY REID : The vast majority of Democrats, Independents and Republicans think this arrangement we’ve just done is unfair, because the richest of the rich have contributed nothing to this. The burden of what has taken place is on the middle class and the poor. My friend talks about no new taxes. Mr. President, if their theory was right, these huge taxes [cuts] that took place during the Bush eight years, the economy should be thriving. These tax cuts have not helped the economy.
AMY GOODMAN : That was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Barbara Ehrenreich, as we begin to wrap up, your comment?
BARBARA EHRENREICH : Well, it&#8217;s a way—it&#8217;s not new. This has been going on for a while, certainly since the Reagan administration. And that is an upward redistribution of wealth by cutting taxes for the wealthiest, and in subtle ways, raising them for the poorest and for the middle class. That&#8217;s what we&#8217;ve got. It&#8217;s a grab. It&#8217;s—I&#8217;m waiting for people to get really, really angry about it. I think one thing that has held back Americans is the idea that you&#8217;re going to get rich, too, you know? That magically, &quot;Hey, I might be one of those multimillionaires next,&quot; so that I don&#8217;t want to tax rich people. I think we&#8217;ve broken through that. I think, you know, that has begun to look like a more and more crazy expectation, that we have to fight for, you know, those people who represent the great majority, the 90 percent of Americans who are not rich.
AMY GOODMAN : Barbara Ehrenreich, I want to thank you very much for being with us, author of—
BARBARA EHRENREICH : Oh, thank you.
AMY GOODMAN : —the bestselling book, Nickel and Dimed . It&#8217;s its 10th anniversary and has just been republished, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America . AMYGOODMAN: Standard & Poor’s announced Friday it’s downgraded the U.S. credit rating for the first time in history. The move by S&P, one of three leading credit rating agencies, came just days after Congress approved a $2.1 trillion deficit-reduction plan. S&P called the outlook "negative," indicating that another downgrade is possible in the next 12 to 18 months. Lowering the nation’s rating to one notch below AAA, the credit rating company said "political brinkmanship" in the debate over the debt had made the U.S. government’s ability to manage its finances, quote, "less stable, less effective and less predictable." It said the $2.1 trillion bipartisan agreement reached last week "fell short" of what was necessary to reduce the nation’s debt over time.

In its report, S&P explicitly blamed the political process in Washington and the refusal by Republicans to raise taxes as part of last week’s agreement to raise the debt ceiling, writing, quote, "We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act," they said.

Speaking to reporters yesterday, Democratic Senator John Kerry blamed Tea Party Republicans who refused to sign on to any deal that raised taxes.

SEN. JOHNKERRY: I believe this is, without question, the Tea Party downgrade. This is the Tea Party downgrade because a minority of people in the House of Representatives countered even the will of many Republicans in the United States Senate, who were prepared to do a bigger deal, to do $4.7 trillion, $4 trillion, have a mix of reductions and reforms, in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, but also recognize that we needed to do some revenue.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, to talk more about the state of the American economy and how it impacts the American people, we go to Washington, D.C., to talk to bestselling author Barbara Ehrenreich.

On her Facebook page, Ehrenreich writes, quote, "My patriotic pride is not offended by S&P’s downgrade of the US credit rating, but by the fact that while resistance bursts out everywhere—Tel Aviv, Santiago, Tottingham, not to mention No. Africa and Middle East—we do NOTHING."

The 10th anniversary edition of Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America has just been published. In the book, she tells the story of life in low-wage America, and she herself tries to earn a living working as a waitress, a hotel maid, a nursing home aide and a Wal-Mart associate. The book, over the last 10 years, has sold more than two million copies.

She’s also the author of many other books, including Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America and Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, a frequent contributor to Harper’s and The Nation and has also a columnist at the New York Times and Time Magazine.

Barbara Ehrenreich, welcome to Democracy Now!

BARBARAEHRENREICH: Good to be with you, Amy.

AMYGOODMAN: It’s great to have you with us. Before we get to Nickel and Dimed, let’s talk about Standard & Poor’s—and perhaps then we’ll go into poor is the standard in America today—but the significance of this for everyday people in the United States, the downgrading of America’s credit rating?

BARBARAEHRENREICH: I don’t know. I’m not sure. I mean, it’s part of a general sense of decline that I think we’ve gotten in many ways and that people like Tom Friedman have been writing about in the New York Times for some time. But, you know, in some ways, that is in another world from most Americans and their day-to-day struggles. What is it going to mean to you if you have no job now? Or if you have a job and you have no health insurance? Or if you are trying to get through college while working full time? It just seems very distant and abstract. When we’re talking about the economy in this country, we seldom talk about real people’s lives.

AMYGOODMAN: And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. I mean, your book took this country by storm. I am sure there was no one more surprised than you, Barbara. You have written a number of books. You did do something very interesting in Nickel and Dimed, but the fact that it caught on in a time when "prosperity" was the watchword, the buzzword, in the mainstream media—talk about—especially for young people who were 10 years old when the book came out, talk about exactly what you did, what you found then, and what it means today, 10 years later, when "prosperity" is certainly not the buzzword.

BARBARAEHRENREICH: Well, I took on a challenge that I set myself, which was to see whether I could support myself on the money I could earn in, well, obviously entry-level jobs, which are the, you know, kind of jobs where you go and apply, and they’re not going to ask—you know, they’re not going to ask for a résumé. They’re not going to—they don’t care about anything, except whether you’re a convicted felon or whether you have—you’re actually—you know, it’s legal for you to work in this country. So, I—you mentioned some of the jobs I worked at. I think you left out the maid with a house cleaning service, though. That was a very instructive one. And all these jobs averaged at the time, in around 2000, about $7 an hour, even including the tips with waitressing, which would be equivalent to about $9 an hour now.

And basically, what I found, that for me, just as one person—I wasn’t trying to support my family with my earnings or anything like that—it just wasn’t doable, because the rents were so out of line with my earnings. And I did try. I mean, I didn’t spend any money except on gas, food and, you know, the bare minimum, which was possible to do because I worked at each city for only a month. You know, so I wasn’t depending—you know, medical care or anything like that was not coming through my jobs.

But I found, you know, a very important thing—well, two very important things. First, at $7 an hour, or $9 an hour in today’s dollars, you’re not considered poor. You know, you don’t show up in the poverty statistics. You’re considered to be fine if you’re one individual earning that much. And the other big lesson here is—which is maybe a hard one to remember at a time of high unemployment—is that jobs are not necessarily a cure for poverty. Jobs that don’t pay enough to live on do not cure poverty. They condemn you, in fact, to a life of low-wage labor and extreme insecurity.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to Barbara Ehrenreich. It’s hard to believe, but her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America came out 10 years ago. And we’re going to talk about some of the people she met as she wrote this book and where they are today, and where America is. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Back in a second.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: We’re talking to bestselling author Barbara Ehrenreich. Her book took the country by storm 10 years ago, called Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Now it’s been updated and out again. Barbara Ehrenreich, our guest.

This figure, Barbara, of the number of Americans on food stamps, almost one in six, almost 15 percent. The figures from May, people on food stamps were 12 percent higher than a year earlier, according to the Agriculture Department. One in almost six Americans. And this applies directly to the people that you met, to the jobs that you took—for example, being a Wal-Mart associate. Talk about that and the woman you wrote about and where she is today.

BARBARAEHRENREICH: Yeah, I mean, one of the surprises to me—and it’s not a surprise anymore, because a lot more research has been done—is how many Wal-Mart employees depend on some kind of government program to supplement their low wages and pathetically inadequate health insurance, which most people can’t afford anyway. In fact, when you—I noticed that when I went through the orientation for my job at Wal-Mart, and there was a whole table full of new hires sitting around, you know, that they, the Wal-Mart people, asked to see whether anybody here might be eligible for TANF, for example, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, because they’re kind of depending on that government—those government supplements to keep people going. You’re not going to do too well on just your Wal-Mart pay. And then, at another time as a Wal-Mart associate, I went to seek food aid. I went to a sort of public/private charitable place that what you could get—you could come out with a sack of food. And when the interviewer—the social worker who interviewed me kept getting me mixed up with somebody. You know, I’d tell her that I had a car, and then she’d forget I had a car, and so on. And then she said, "You know, it’s just—we have other—you know, people are always coming from Wal-Mart. You work at Wal-Mart. I get you mixed up." And that, to me, was a big clue.

AMYGOODMAN: So, in other words, I mean, you have Wal-Mart, that is famous around the country for fighting unionization, part of the whole movement of corporations that fight tax cuts for the wealthy, for example, is subsidized by the government, is subsidized by the U.S. taxpayers.

BARBARAEHRENREICH: Oh, yes. I mean, in many more ways than that. I mean, there are so many subsidies often involved in luring a Wal-Mart to one’s area—you know, tax rebates or, you know, things like that. But I was very excited yesterday. I went to the Jobs with Justice conference in Washington, D.C. That’s an organization that’s devoted to getting workers rights and improving their standard of living. And there were a number of women Wal-Mart employees there—or "associates," as they are called—who are now organizing their own workers’ association, called "OUR Walmart." And this is a new thing. And they were dynamic. So things may be about to change a little.

AMYGOODMAN: Barbara Ehrenreich, in 2009, you co-authored an article called "The Destruction of the Black Middle Class." And you wrote, quote, "For African Americans—and to a large extent, Latinos—the recession is over. It occurred between 2000 and 2007. [...] What’s happening now is a depression," you wrote.

Well, we’ve just reported on a new study of the U.S. census data by the Pew Research Center that reveals wealth gaps between whites and people of color in the United States have grown to their widest levels since the U.S. government began tracking them a quarter of a century ago. White Americans now have on average 20 times the net worth of African Americans, 18 times that of Latinos. Last month, we spoke about the findings with Roderick Harrison, who’s the former chief of racial statistics at the Census Bureau.

RODERICKHARRISON: People use net worth or draw on net worth to invest in their children’s education, to help with perhaps a first home, a down payment for a first home. We’re entering a period now where black and Hispanic families, one-third of whom have no net worth at all or negative net worth, won’t be able to help their children in this way. So this is going to definitely play into the next generation.

AMYGOODMAN: Barbara, your thoughts on the report and of the state of black and Latino middle class in this country, if you can even talk about these—

BARBARAEHRENREICH: Yeah.

AMYGOODMAN: —lines anymore?

BARBARAEHRENREICH: Yes. You know, the case of African Americans is very particularly tragic. When you recall that they didn’t—in the middle of the 20th century, they didn’t have a lot of wealth compared to white people, because they came from, you know, very underpaid agricultural jobs, often, in the South. Then—and they couldn’t get credit. You know, that was a big problem. You could not get credit because of racist lending policies. Then, in the 2000s, suddenly, the banks started offering credit actually targeting African Americans, and to a certain extent, Latinos, much more than white people with their subprime mortgages. And it was—you know, it seemed like a great boon to people who hadn’t had credit before because of racism. Surprise, of course. You know, that was a big part of the wipeout of so much of the black middle class, plus the fact, which is hard to explain, that blacks have been much more likely to be laid off in the peak years of the layoffs in the recession and to be unemployed now, three times more likely.

AMYGOODMAN: Barbara Ehrenreich, talk about some of the other people in Nickel and Dimed that you’ve caught up with 10 years later, that you met as you eked out your living as a house cleaner, as a maid, as a Wal-Mart associate. Who did you find, and who didn’t you find?

BARBARAEHRENREICH: Well, I didn’t find most people. And the reason for that is simple: you may leave that person with an address and a phone number, but those—neither of those is likely to be good in a few months. People—you know, there’s a lot of insecurity among low-wage people, a lot of turmoil in terms of their housing situation, cell phones get cut off, and so on.

A couple of people, I tracked down. One was not doing that badly. She was still at Wal-Mart. She had advanced to, I think, the huge amount of $10 an hour. But in the meantime, her husband had lost his job, so that, you know, their situation was not at all better. And another woman was piecing together a living cleaning houses and, you know, cooking for other people, sort of what she called "catering." But she was in very bad health, and it was hard for her to do.

The thing that is so painful is that there’s no help coming for people like that. There’s so little help anymore. Food stamps, yes, that’s a help. And I am very—I was very pleased that Obama expanded the food stamp program in '08 and ’09. He made it easier for many people to get unemployment insurance. Now, of course, it's been the aim of Republicans in the Congress to eliminate all such things and to eliminate Medicaid. There’s very little help.

AMYGOODMAN: You’re extremely critical of President Obama. You’ve advocated that students not pay back their college loans, among other things. Talk about both.

BARBARAEHRENREICH: Well, I didn’t come up with that idea, but there is organizing going on among debt-burdened young people, who come out of college, you know, with an average of $25,000 in debt and very likely no job or no professional job that’s going to help them pay that off. And there’s a movement among them for debt forgiveness, to just say, "Hey, we cannot do this. You know, we can’t—we don’t have the jobs that’ll allow us to pay these debts off." And, you know, that’s kind of exciting. That’s what’s going on in Chile right now, has to do with the cost of college, tuition. You know, all the demonstrations in Santiago in the last few days have to do with the cost of college. And I think we’re going to have to see something like that here, with people just saying, "Can’t do it. We can’t do it."

AMYGOODMAN: Now President Obama, your assessment of him, particularly how he’s dealing with, or not, the jobs crisis?

BARBARAEHRENREICH: I feel like saying, "What President Obama?" You know, he forgot about jobs, decided to focus instead on the issue the Republicans chose, which was the debt limit and the deficit. This is tragic. I have no explanation. I just—the only little footnote I would add, though, is that jobs are not enough, unless they pay enough for people to live on. And one thing we’ve seen among American employers—probably employers worldwide, but especially in America recently—is an unquenchable zeal on the part of employers to hold down wages by any means. It’s not just preventing unionization. It’s so many little tricks that happen at the workplace. It’s little tricks like you have to get to work at 7:45 a.m., but the clock doesn’t start ticking until 8:15 a.m. or something. That’s wage theft, which is another nice way of saying sort of unpaid labor or a kind of slavery even. We have, you know, so many things that are holding people down.

I would point out—and these are things that I was not aware of when I finished Nickel and Dimed, or they weren’t, you know, very prominent yet—is that employers no longer want to hire unemployed people. Think about that. They don’t want to hire people with bad credit ratings. Well, you know, who doesn’t have a bad credit rating if they’ve been unemployed for a little while and having to pay their own health insurance and everything? So it’s as if, you know, you try to climb out, you try to hold on, and you just get kicked in the face, one way or another, and pushed further down.

AMYGOODMAN: Barbara Ehrenreich, the Heritage Foundation came out with a study called "Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox: What is Poverty in the United States Today?" by researchers Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield, who say the U.S. Census Bureau has reported for the past two decades that over 30 million Americans are living in poverty. But, you know, they ask, well, what does it really mean to be poor? And you get, from the headline—cable TV, air conditioning, etc.—what it means to the Heritage Foundation.

BARBARAEHRENREICH: Yes. Robert Rector at the Heritage Foundation has had a campaign for many decades now to prove that the poor in America really live in some kind of luxury. I would like to say, yeah, in some places, boy, you better have air conditioning. You know, in the D.C. area where I live now, you could not have survived very easily the summer, even with occasional cooling centers to go to.

But the truth is, here’s what’s happening. More and more people are having to crowd into smaller spaces to live. This is since—this has been going on for a lot of people, you know, for many years. But since the recession, since the financial crisis in '07, you find more and more families—you can have one family per bedroom and somebody, a couch surfer, on the couch in the living room. There's nothing comfortable about that. You know, one of the things that really woke me up to how bad things were was in '09 when a family member of mine suddenly needed money to pay her mortgage or her home would be taken away. I was able to help, but when I found out the real facts, I was horrified. Her home was a trailer home. Not only that, it's a dilapidated trailer home. She lives in it—a single-wide trailer home—along with her daughter and two grandchildren. Now that’s getting down to, you know, third-world levels of poverty, when you crowd that many people into such an inadequate dwelling.

Another thing people are doing: give up on medical care. You know, if we have a healthcare system in the United States, I think its real name is Tylenol. You can’t—you know, it’s something you have to drop. You can’t do it. Food prices are too high. Fuel prices are too high. So you have to give up on those things that it seems like you can get through another day without, even if that’s your blood pressure medicine.

AMYGOODMAN: There are some—

BARBARAEHRENREICH: So I—

AMYGOODMAN: There are some who are doing very well, of course. The luxury category has posted 10 consecutive months of sales increases compared to a year earlier, this a report in the New York Times. Luxury items are—

BARBARAEHRENREICH: Yes.

AMYGOODMAN: —you know, are flying off the shelves, if yachts can fit on shelves.

BARBARAEHRENREICH: Yes, yes, the rich are back. The rich are back. And that’s one reason why, when you read some of our major national newspapers, there’s not much mention anymore of the recession or economic hard times, because the people at the top are doing great. There was an article recently in the New York Times about tree houses that the very wealthy will build for their children, you know, in their backyard, if they even call them "backyards," on their property—tree houses that can cost as much as $350,000 and include flat-screen TVs and air conditioning. That’s for the kid to go out in a backyard and play in. Three hundred fifty thousand dollars. You know, I think that’s flaunting it a little too much.

AMYGOODMAN: Last week, Congress agreed to raise the federal debt ceiling following protracted negotiations. The deal includes no new tax revenue from wealthy Americans, no additional stimulus for the economy. Speaking on the Senate floor, Majority Leader Harry Reid criticized Republicans for blocking the tax hike on the wealthy.

SEN. HARRYREID: The vast majority of Democrats, Independents and Republicans think this arrangement we’ve just done is unfair, because the richest of the rich have contributed nothing to this. The burden of what has taken place is on the middle class and the poor. My friend talks about no new taxes. Mr. President, if their theory was right, these huge taxes [cuts] that took place during the Bush eight years, the economy should be thriving. These tax cuts have not helped the economy.

BARBARAEHRENREICH: Well, it’s a way—it’s not new. This has been going on for a while, certainly since the Reagan administration. And that is an upward redistribution of wealth by cutting taxes for the wealthiest, and in subtle ways, raising them for the poorest and for the middle class. That’s what we’ve got. It’s a grab. It’s—I’m waiting for people to get really, really angry about it. I think one thing that has held back Americans is the idea that you’re going to get rich, too, you know? That magically, "Hey, I might be one of those multimillionaires next," so that I don’t want to tax rich people. I think we’ve broken through that. I think, you know, that has begun to look like a more and more crazy expectation, that we have to fight for, you know, those people who represent the great majority, the 90 percent of Americans who are not rich.

AMYGOODMAN: Barbara Ehrenreich, I want to thank you very much for being with us, author of—

BARBARAEHRENREICH: Oh, thank you.

AMYGOODMAN: —the bestselling book, Nickel and Dimed. It’s its 10th anniversary and has just been republished, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.